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luckyladylily · 6 months ago

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So like, transandrophobia.

To start this out, I am a trans woman, been around in the queer community for a while. I'm also bisexuality, polyamorous, disabled, and aromantic, and I think these other parts of my identity and the crap I've caught over the years for them heavily informs how I analyze something like transandrophobia. My wife is also asexual, so that plays a part in it too.

So every group of marginalized people has their own unique experiences and problems. It's more of a rule than something we've mathematically demonstrated, but as far as these things go it's ridiculously well established, and personally every time I've done even a basic dive into the issues faced by a marginalized group it's been self evident. I could easily list a dozen groups ranging from racial minorities to different kinds of disabled people to different queer identities and analyze their social issues but let's be real, this is pretty well established theory, anyone who needs me to do that is not really interacting with good faith. This is one of the big reasons we talk to people about their own experiences and groups, we cannot reasonably extrapolate the experiences of others from our own.

So like trans men and trans mascs and anyone else that falls under that umbrella has their unique experiences. The idea that we would even question this is weird to me? Like I can't even imagine the kind of evidence someone would need to present to me to change my mind, and given the pattern of the queer community to be shitty in exactly this way to people in our community, yeah that is not happening.

Therefore, we are taking it for granted that the trans men/masc/related umbrella has their own things going on like everyone else ever, and I don't understand how someone acting in good faith can try to claim otherwise unless they are young or otherwise very inexperienced with such things.

The next point of contention seems to be the name, and I gotta be real I don't care and I don't understand why other people do. I've read all sorts of arguments against the word transandrophobia and the majority of them seem to be rooted in a misunderstanding of intersectionality, and even then it's like there is such a thing where people get so mired in theory that they miss the forest for the trees.

Perhaps more important to me, getting overly worked up about something as unimportant as the precise term is... weird. Like exclusionists hating on bi and ace people weird. I remember what it was like a decade ago when exclusionists were trying to police the words of bi women, and five years ago when ace and aro people were under constant attack under the pretense that our language was harmful for some reason or other. You are going to have to work very, very, very hard to convince me that any bickering over language as it relates to transandrophobia is not just more of the same.

Next, "transandrobros hate trans femmes" and similar stuff. I've seen the callout posts and found them completely unconvincing. Again, they read a lot like the old "ace people hate lesbians!" posts I used to see. I'm not convinced that the individuals involved were a problem, I am certainly not able to extrapolate a problem to the rest of the group.

Finally, there is this idea that "maleness is not a vector for oppression" and this invalidates something about the whole transandrophobia thing, ranging from the entire concept of trans men experiencing prejudice to something about language being imprecise all the way to "This is fascist shit, omg these people are basically nazis" depending on who says it. I'm not going to touch any of that and just look at the underlying logic.

This is based off a misunderstanding of intersectionality theory. Many people think of intersectionality as defining intersecting prejudice, like a ven diagram, such that transmisogyny is the intersection of transphobia and misogyny. This is incorrect. Intersectionality defines unique prejudice experienced by people with intersecting identities. Instead of a transmisogyny as the overlap of transphobia and misogyny, imagine adding a third circle that overlaps both but also has its own areas covered by neither.

Applied to transandrophobia, even if we assume maleness is not a vector for oppression, there is no reason to assume that the intersection of maleness with a marginalized identity doesn't result in new issues. Imagine that 3 circle venn diagram that represents misogyny, transphobia, and transmisogyny. Even if you remove the misogyny circle there is still plenty of ground covered by the transmisogyny circle.

This just isn't a valid criticism. It is a pure theory approach based on a flawed reading of theory.

So in summary:

Everyone has their unique shit going on and I've seen no convincing evidence that trans men, mascs, etc. Are the exception.

I not seen any convincing argument that the word itself is bad.

I've not seen any convincing evidence that there is some epidemic of transandrophobia truthers hating and harassing trans femmes on scales higher than normal background queer infighting.

The most coherent objection to transandrophobia I've seen is categorically incorrect and based on a fundamental misunderstanding of intersectionality theory.

I would like to remind everyone at this point I am a trans woman, part of the group that is supposedly a problem for and I've just not see it at all, to the point where it is kind of weird how intensely some people are pushing this.

I'm not trying to be mean or whatever, I'm sure the distress on display here comes from a real place and real trauma, but I've yet to see anything that makes me think there is substance to the objections to transandrophobia as a concept. It feels and reads like the latest round of queer intracommunity exclusionism, and the fact that this time around I'm not one of the target identities doesn't change that for me.

#I was tired of this shit 8 years ago when lesbians were telling me I was evil for calling myself a bisexual femme #You are going to have to do a lot better than this to convince me that trans dudes using a word is some crisis

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months ago

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What’s wrong with tariffs

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in CHICAGO TONIGHT (Apr 2) with PETER SAGAL, and in BLOOMINGTON on FRIDAY (Apr 4). More tour dates here.

It's not that the Republicans and the Democrats are the same…obviously. But for decades – since Clinton – the Dems have sided with neoliberal economics, just like their Republican counterparts, so the major differences between the two related to overt discrimination, to the exclusion of the economic policies that immiserated working people, with the worst effects landing on racial minorities, women, and gender minorities.

So the Dems stood against discrimination in mortgage lending – but not for the minimum wage that would have lifted the lowest paid workers out of poverty so the could afford a mortgage. They stood for abortion rights, but against Medicare For All, which meant all women had the right to an abortion, but the poorest women couldn't afford one. And of course, in a country where racial and gender discrimination were still the order of the day, the poorest and most vulnerable Americans were racialized, women, disabled, and/or queer.

The Dems' embrace of Reaganomics meant that working people of all types experienced steady decline over 40 years: stagnating wages, economic precarity, increased indebtedness, and rising prices for health care, education, and housing. When Trump figured out that he could campaign on these issues, Dems had no response. Trump's "Make America Great Again" was meant to appeal to a time when working Americans were – on average, depending on their whiteness, maleness and straightness – better housed, better paid, and better cared for.

Of course, those benefits were unevenly felt: America was slow to extend the New Deal to racial minorities, women, disabled people, and other disfavored groups. Trump's genius was to marry white supremacy to economic grievance, tricking white workers into blaming their decline on women, brown and Black people, and queers – and not on the billionaires who had grown so much richer even as workers got poorer.

But Trump couldn't have pulled this trick off without the Dem establishment's total unwillingness to confront the hollowness of their economic policies. From Pelosi's "We're capitalists and that's the way it is" to Hillary Clinton's catastrophic campaign slogan, "America is already great," the Dems' answer to workers' fear and anger was, "You are wrong, everything is fine." Imagine having had your house stolen in the foreclosure crisis after Obama decided to "foam the runways" for the banks by letting them steal their borrowers' homes and then hearing Hillary Clinton tell you "America is already great":

https://www.npr.org/2014/05/25/315276441/its-geithner-vs-warren-in-battle-of-the-bailout

Racial and gender justice matter, of course, but when they're pursued without considering economic justice, they're dead ends. The point of racial and gender justice can't merely be firing half of the 150 straight white men who control 99% of the country's capital and replacing them with 75 assorted women, queers and people of color. The worst-treated workers in America are also its most discriminated-against workers, so the best way to help women, racialized people, and other disfavored minorities is to help workers: protect unions, raise the minimum wage, defend tenants, cancel student debt, and give everyone healthcare. In the same way that a special tax on incomes over $1m will disproportionately affect straight white men, an increase in the minimum wage will disproportionately benefit women and people of color – as well as the majority of straight white men who are also getting fucked over by people with $1m salaries.

Since the Clinton years, Democrats have been trying to figure out how to defend economic policies that help rich people while still somehow being the party of social justice. This has produced a kind of grotesque, Sheryl Sandberg "Lean In" liberalism, which stood for the rights of women who were also corporate executives. It's not that these women aren't treated worse than their male counterparts – misogyny is alive and well in the boardroom. But the number of women who experience boardroom discrimination is tiny, because the number of women in the boardroom is also tiny.

The right saw and opportunity and seized it. As Naomi Klein writes in Doppelganger, they created "mirror world" versions of social justice issues, warped reflections of the leftist positions that had been abandoned by a progressive coalition led by liberals:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

In right wing, conspiratorial hands, rage at wage stagnation and lack of parental leave turned into reactionary demands for an economy in which women would be full-time homemakers while their husbands recovered their roles as breadwinners. The 1999 Battle of Seattle saw mass protests over the WTO and a free trade agenda that would let capital chase low wages and weak environmental and worker safety policies around the world. But Clinton went ahead and signed more free trade agreements, which were also pursued by Obama. So the right filled the vacuum with a mirror-world version of the Battle of Seattle's rage at billionaires, transforming the anti-free trade agenda into racism, xenophobia, and Cold War 2.0 sinophobia.

It's a cheap trick, but Dems keep falling for it. When the right declares itself to be against something, Dems can be relied upon to be in favor it, no matter how reactionary, anti-worker and authoritarian "it" is. During Trump 1.0, Dems lit James Comey votive candles and passionately defended the "intelligence community," a community that gave us CIA dirty wars and FBI COINTELPRO. Anthropologists call this "schizmogenesis" – when a group defines itself by valuing whatever its rivals deplore, and vice versa:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

You can see schizmogenesis playing out right now, as "progressives" make Signalgate scandal into a fight over poor operational security (planning a war crime using a commercial app) and not a fight over war crimes themselves.

Signalgate will be out of the headlines in a matter of days, though – unlike tariffs, which will continue to make global headlines throughout the Trump presidency, as Trump continues his "mad king" policy of recklessly and chaotically erecting trade barriers that are certain to make supply chains more brittle and raise prices.

For the most part, the progressive discussion of Trump's tariffs takes the position that tariffs are always a terrible idea – in other words, that Clinton and Obama had the right idea when they created free trade agreements with countries around the world, and Trump is vandalizing an engine of American and global prosperity out of economic ignorance.

Economists support this analysis. But in a new, well-argued editorial in The Sling, University of Utah economists Mark Glick and Gabriel Lozada present a more nuanced version of the tariff debate, one that dodges the trap of neoliberal economics and schizmogenesis:

https://www.thesling.org/the-failed-assumptions-of-free-trade/

Rejecting tariffs is practically an article of religious faith among economists. As the NYT put it in their reporting of the 2025 meeting of the American Economic Association, "free trade is perhaps the closest thing to a universally held value among economists":

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/business/economy/economists-politics-trump.html

Every Econ 101 class has a unit on David Ricardo's "theory of comparative advantage," which argues that different countries have different capacities and specialties, and that free trade allows these advantages to be shared to the benefit of everyone, making trade a "positive expectation" game. The corollary is that tariffs make everyone worse off.

As Glick and Lozada write, the logic of this argument is unassailable, provided you accept its bedrock assumptions as true – and that's where the problem lies.

Economics has an assumptions problem. The foundational method of economic practice is to create models grounded in assumptions that are either not known, not knowable, or – incredibly – known to be wrong. As Milton Friedman famously wrote:

Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

It's actually worse than it seems, because economics, as a field, has been violently allergic to empirically testing its assumptions, so it doesn't even know when it is operating on the basis of one of Friedman's "wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality." This is what Ely Devons meant when he said, "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

What are the assumptions that underpin the orthodox view of free trade, then? As Glick and Lozada write, the case against all tariffs depends on five assumptions, all of which fail empirical investigation.

I. Full employment

The standard model of free trade assumes full employment – "when workers are displaced by imports, they can easily become re-employed at the same wages." This is the crux of the "social surplus" that free trade theoretically produces. This assumption doesn't hold up to empirical scrutiny. After the US dropped its tariffs, it experienced a 74% decline in manufacturing jobs – the best-paid jobs for non-college-educated men. Those workers didn't find equivalent employment – indeed, in many cases, the found no employment at all. From 2001-18, the US lost 1.132m manufacturing jobs to China, and gained 0.176m jobs manufacturing goods for export to China.

II. No externalities

The employment losses from free trade are not evenly distributed – they are geographically concentrated, and the greatest concentrations are in regions that flipped from Democratic strongholds to Trumpish heartlands over the decades since the US dropped its tariffs. The losses to these regions aren't limited to the directly affected manufacturing jobs, but all the other economic activity those jobs supported. The people who sold groceries, cars, and furniture to factory workers also lost their jobs. When young people abandoned the cratering regional economy, that devastated education and other services catering to families.

III. Comparative advantage leads to long-term growth and development

The theory of comparative advantage says that the world is better off when each country gets to do the thing it's best at. What are poor countries best at? Being poor: having a cheap labor force and weak rule of law to protect workers' health and the environment.

Without exception, the poor countries that grew richer did so in the presence of tariffs: "free trade is not a development strategy, it is a static policy that can impede development":

https://2024.sci-hub.se/1864/6d3f610c51446f057a4054080c70ab0e/chang2003.pdf#navpanes=0&view=FitH

IV. Floating currencies keep trade balanced

In theory, adjustments in the currency markets will rebalance imports and exports – countries whose currency declines will have to switch to domestic production, because goods from abroad will become costly. That's not what happened. Instead, foreigners have invested the US dollars they got from selling things to Americans into US securities and real estate, "which does not increase US productivity because it generates no new capital formation (at least directly)."

V. The US provides compensation for trade-related job-losses

While other countries with robust social safety nets offered retraining, income support, and other programs to cushion the blow of trade-related job-losses, the US – with the worst social safety net in the rich world – offered "woefully inadequate" supports to dislocated workers:

https://www.piie.com/bookstore/job-loss-imports-measuring-costs

Now, just because some tariffs are beneficial, it doesn't follow that all tariffs are beneficial. When the "Asian Tiger" countries were undergoing rapid industrialization and lifting billions of people out of poverty, they did so with tariffs – but also with extensive industrial policy and direct investment in critical state industries (Biden was the first president in generations to pursue industrial policy, albeit a modest and small one, which Trump nevertheless dismantled).

Trump is doing mirror-world tariffs: tariffs without industrial policy, tariffs without social safety nets, tariffs without retraining, tariffs without any strategic underpinning. These tariffs will crash the US economy and will create calamitous effects around the world:

https://archive.is/JvRF9

But the fact that Trump's tariffs are terrible doesn't mean tariffs themselves are always and forever bad. Resist the schizmogenic urge to say, "Trump likes tariffs, so I hate them." Not all tariffs are created equal, and tariffs can be a useful tool that benefits working people.

And also: the fact that tariffs can be useful doesn't imply that only tariffs are useful. The digital age – in which US-based multinational firms rely on digital technology to loot the economies of America's trading partners – offers countries facing US tariffs a powerful retaliatory tactic that has never before been seen on this planet. America's (former) trading partners can retaliate against US tariffs by abolishing the legal measures they have instituted to protect the products of US companies from reverse-engineering and modification. Countries facing US tariffs can welcome US imports – of printers, Teslas, iPhones, games consoles, insulin pumps, ventilators and tractors – but then legalize jailbreaking these devices:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/08/turnabout/#is-fair-play

That would deprive the largest US companies of their recurring revenue streams – from service, consumables, software, payment processing, etc – creating huge savings for consumers all over the world, and huge profits for the non-US companies that make these jailbreaking tools, and the small businesses that supply them. For example, your country could become the world's leading exporter of iPhone jailbreaking tools, and the world's powerhouse for alternative iPhone stores that charge 1-2% commissions on payments, as opposed to the 30% Apple takes out of every dollar (euro, pound, peso) that iPhone owners spend within their apps. This would tempt in all the biggest app companies in the world – from Patreon to Tinder, Fornite to the New York Times – who could offer their products at a discount and still make more money than they make on Apple's App Store.

But that's just one market this enables: the actual business of iPhone jailbreaking would likely work much like the market for phone unlocking more broadly: thousands of small and medium-sized businesses like dry-cleaners and convenience stores where you can bring your phone and pay a few dollars to have it unlocked and set up with a new app store where all the apps are the same – but everything is 20% cheaper.

This is a development opportunity without parallel. US tech monopolists worked with the US trade representative to rig markets around the world, allowing tech giants to siphon away vast fortunes from America's trading partners. These rich deposits of wealth are just sitting there, begging for some country to sink a shaft into them and pump them dry, secure in the knowledge that Trump has ejected from the global system of free trade and they have nothing to lose.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/02/me-or-your-lying-eyes/#spherical-cows-on-frictionless-surfaces

#pluralistic #economism #doppelganger #economics #free trade #tariffs #trumpism #anticircumvention #move fast and break kings #socialism of fools

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molsno · 10 months ago

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I don't think there's anything wrong with enjoying kids shows as an adult per se, like that's obviously fine by itself. however I think the fact that there are so many Queers™ that almost exclusively watch shows made for children, and that most of those shows were produced by disney, is indicative of a broader trend of reactionary ideologies in mainstream queer society. often they praise these shows for having "queer representation" in some form, such as a gay couple, usually comprised of young children given who these shows are usually about. of course even these meager scraps of representation are often enough to get a show canceled, but the fact is that for them to even be on children's television in the first place, they must be extremely sanitized. disney in particular is notorious for scrubbing any and all content that any hypothetical evangelical conservative might take issue with from their shows, but this is a problem inherent to children's tv.

I say this not to disparage people who like these shows, but to point out that these shows serve to impose heterosexual norms onto queerness, and it concerns me how many queer people seem to be completely fine with this. why should disney channel and cartoon network get to define what an acceptable level of queerness is? the most radical thing you can expect to see is a same-sex couple briefly kissing. they are wholly sexless and sanitized, stripped away of any challenges to heterosexuality, cissexism, monogamy, and patriarchy. Straight People get the idea that they don't have to worry about queerness, as long as it conforms to their sensibilities and doesn't threaten their dominance.

but worst of all is that queer people themselves approve of this sanitization. I suspect the reason that so many queer people's media landscape revolves entirely around these shows is because they seek acceptance into Straight society, and must prove that they won't rock the boat too much. in doing so, they seek out only portrayals of queerness they consider "safe", and eagerly distance themselves from any form of "degeneracy". queer sexuality, for instance, must be a wholly private endeavor, as it is something shameful. any form of kink that isn't acceptable under wider heterosexual norms is something they must vehemently abhor, and engaging in it must be responded to with violence, whether social, physical, or both.

to be clear, I'm not saying that exclusively watching children's shows causes queer people to be reactionary. on the contrary, I think it's the other way around. queer people who already hold reactionary beliefs flock to these shows because it allows them to see themselves in media while still being able to gain temporary, limited access to the heterosexual project and the privileges doled out to its participants. this is deeply disgraceful. not only is the queer project of assimilating into straightness an inherently harmful one given that it necessitates intentionally throwing queer people who can't assimilate due to being trans, black, disabled, poor, etc under the bus and subjecting them to violence; it's also a fool's errand, given that straight people ultimately still hate the queer people that do try to assimilate and will discard them the moment they stop being a useful tool.

#my writing

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dolphin-diaries · 2 months ago

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i apologise if this is too venty or oversharing. i've been reading your and talia's essays while in the middle of my own gender-crisis and while i recognise them as the most comprehensive and sensible framework i've seen to understand how the patriarchy works - and i regret how this might come off as a whiny "what about me" - when patriarchy forces us into these strict biodestinies, what's the point of transitioning or trying to express your gender outside the box? again i do not mean this as a gotcha or declaring that people shouldn't transition ever, but the closest thing i've got to describing myself is "dykegender" and i know declaring myself as one would be met with raised eyebrows and "humouring the crazy" at best and being violently regendered into broodmare at worst. it's already so hard to explain and declare myself and just be seen as a lesbian, and i'm struggling to see if there's any benefits to openly being a deviant woman-dyke-thing vs swallowing my (relatively minor) dysphoria

thank you for reading this. thank you for your writing. i hope i come off as sincere and with respect.

I'm glad you find our writing thought-provoking. And yeah, first of all, I want to say that I empathise with your feelings--I think a lot of queer people struggle with existing legibly, because queerness is made illegible by the patriarchy. So your "what's even the point??" question makes sense.

Because I don't know you, I'm going to have to make some assumptions and answer from multiple angles, sometimes over explaining myself, because I don't know what baseline you're coming from. I hope that's okay.

Firstly, transition can actually change the way people gender you, even in places where trans-ness is very invisible. But based on what you wrote, I'm going to assume you're dissatisfied with simply shifting your perceived sex from woman to man or vice versa. Secondly, if you have physical dysphoria, addressing that will help you even if no one else on the planet recognises that as anything of importance. It's still your body to live in 24/7, and you'll be happier if you like living in it.

When it comes to the function of patriarchy, you probably understand that Talia and I talk about the overarching emergent system. Its details differ by location and culture and subculture--the core large-scale tendencies stay largely the same, but their expression and severity changes. More to the point, not all people follow patriarchal prescripts all the time or at all. So, an environment that does not denigrate you because you call yourself dykegender, and that does not treat you or women like would-be broodmares, is possible--I can attest to that from personal experience. Even if people in such an environment don't understand what your specific gender means, trust me they are capable of not treating you like shit. You are not submitting yourself to the judgement of the entire world at all times, and you do not need to measure the worthiness of your actions by the worst treatment you get or might get.

In other words, finding friends and community with people that do see you is possible--they exist, you're reading essays by some of them. I will not deny that there will still be people that meet you with confusion and hostility, but to say that their existence makes the entirety of your being a lost cause is a bit fatalistic. I feel like the good times we have in our queer communities, big and small, are not less worthwhile or fulfilling because of the suppression we face outside.

Lastly, I'm going to give you advice that you might scoff at, but hear me out. The thing with writings about social constructs of patriarchy and disability and so on is that they're not good at inspiring contentment and affirmative happy fun times. That isn't their purpose. But human beings need some amount of affirmative happy fun times, especially in crisis. That leads to some human beings sticking their heads in the sand and never emerging to face reality again, but you seem to have the exact opposite tendency.

So I will recommend that you seek out lesbian genderfucky fiction in whatever way you prefer to consume fiction. Talia and I both write that occasionally, but this isn't a plug and I don't know what you like. Regardless, the psyche is a muscle that needs rest, and escapist and cathartic fiction is a form of rest in which your mind gets to try on different realities and experience them in a safe environment. And, in seeking out people that create fiction resembling the kind of worlds you'd like to live in, you can also connect with people that also enjoy that fiction--meaning, they're probably like you, and will understand you. This isn't per se about fandom, but rather shared dreams and aspirations and communities. Even when you're isolated in a terrible situation IRL, that can give you solace for the moment and eventually strength to try and change your circumstance--and friends who can help you do that, including materially.

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canonizzyhours · 4 months ago

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The Izzy Discourse isn’t about shipwars or people being harassed “just” for liking a character. I suspect that the majority of us would agree that liking Izzy isn’t bad or inherently racist or pro-abuse because—obviously—liking a character is not indicative of a person’s morality.

The Izzy Discourse exists because folks deep in the Izzy Canyon (let’s call them Cayoneers) continue to characterize themselves as a victimized minority, claim that criticism and disagreement are harassment, and dissuade the larger fandom from having important conversations about topics like racism and abuse by calling anyone trying to have those conversations a racist or an abuse apologist.

First: Canyoneers are not a victimized minority who receive the majority of harassment in this fandom. Other fans frequently disagree with them—either directly in their posts or indirectly in their own posts—but disagreement is not harassment. Critiquing an interpretation of canon that contradicts most other interpretations is not harassment. Receiving pushback after making a statement that most fans find ridiculous? Not harassment.

When Canyoneers refer to doxxing incidents, they only bring up the one where someone was doxxed by antis “for being an Izzy fan.” I was in the fandom when this happened and, as I remember, the kid who doxxed this fan did so because they thought that it was immoral for them to like Izzy and Calico Jack AND that the content of their writing was morally deplorable. This puriteen was called out by everyone and the fan who was doxxed received support from every corner of the fandom. Canyoneers tend to leave out the full stated reason for the doxxing (liking Calico Jack, writing ~taboo~ content) as well as the fact that the kid responsible was broadly condemned. They make the incident entirely about loving Izzy, which it was not.

I never hear about when Jac deactivated from Twitter in 2023 under threat of doxxing from Canyoneers. No one talks about the Tumblr user who was harassed about their fundraiser for trans-affirming surgery. What about the Tumblr account made specifically to document alleged abuse towards Izzy fans that engages in its fair share of harassment and calls out users Canyoneers don’t like by name? If anyone calls out any of this bad behavior, Canyoneers close ranks to protect their own. They deny or justify their actions. They make it everyone’s fault but theirs.

Canyoneers aren’t the only people in this fandom who have been hurt. I’ve received death threats, and so have some of my friends. Several people I know have genuinely been harassed off of social media platforms by Izzy stans. Canyoneers dogpile on posts that they disagree with, even if the post is tagged in whatever way they prescribe (and their preferred tag for Izzy critical content is always subject to change). It’s ridiculous that this splinter of the OFMD fandom has decided that they’ve suffered more than any other part when they demonstrably have not.

The Canyon is largely united by their perceived suffering, so it’s not surprising that they characterize Izzy as a character who has also suffered unfairly. Poor Izzy suffers from classism due to his Northern accent. Izzy behaves the way he does because he’s losing the man he loves to the kind of posh aristocrat who oppresses people like him. Izzy is punished for trying to get Ed to do his job. Izzy is only cruel because he’s anxious, because he’s scared, because he’s just trying to keep himself and Ed alive. Izzy died even though he’s the most queer, the most femme, the most disabled, the most everything.

It’s all about being the victim and maintaining that Izzy is himself a victim.

Second: Canyoneers make it difficult to talk about racism and abuse—topics that we should absolutely be able to discuss as a fandom.

Liking Izzy does not make someone racist. Granting Izzy infinite grace while condemning Ed, grafting Ed’s characteristics onto Izzy while pushing Ed out of the narrative, claiming that Ed needs to be managed, and maintaining that Ed is violent and abusive? Racist. But challenging Canyoneers garners violent pushback and insistence that you’re the real racist for disagreeing with them.

Indigenous people and men of color have historically been depicted in media as savage and violent. They’re portrayed as frightening, animalistic, abusive, incapable of control, in need of the civilizing influence of the dominant culture to be accomplished. OFMD consciously pushes back against all of these stereotypes only to have Canyoneers bring them back! A fandom that should be a safe space for people of color, especially men, becomes a hostile environment because fans of a white character need to make an indigenous man worse to justify their takes.

In canon, Ed is not a violent or abusive man. That’s not implied—it’s a huge part of his character and his struggle. He’s a kind man trapped in an abusive culture that he wants to leave behind. Canyoneers have a tendency to make Ed worse in order to make Izzy look better. They turn Ed into a monster and call it canon, and if they’re challenged, they try to turn the argument around. If I say that interpreting Ed as more violent than he is in canon feeds into harmful racist stereotypes about indigenous men, I’m told that I’m denying the experiences of people who have been abused by indigenous men by claiming that they can’t be violent. If I say that Izzy pushed Ed into his Kraken persona, I’m told that I’m the real racist for denying Ed’s agency.

Talk about abuse is shut down in the same way. Izzy abuses Ed—this is made explicitly clear in season two for anyone who denied the existence of emotional abuse after season one—but who’s brave enough to talk about it when the Canyoneers are ready to attack anyone who doesn’t think that Izzy’s the victim? They’ll say that Izzy’s only crime was saying some mean words and that anyone who thinks Ed is in the right approves of abusing people who are mouthy or unpleasant. They deny the reality of reactive abuse and the devastation that emotional abuse can wreck. They hope that anyone who doesn’t think that Izzy is the victim of abuse never gets anywhere near real victims of abuse, completely dismissing the lived experiences of fans who have experienced abuse and see their abusers’ words and actions in Izzy’s.

Canyoneers can’t stand discussions about racism and abuse as they relate to Izzy, and I understand why. Many of them relate to Izzy in all of his meanness and humorlessness (and at least one has flat out said that an abusive behavior of Izzy’s is something they do); all of them consider themselves good and progressive people. They have to deny that their defenses of Izzy and condemnations of Ed are racist by any means possible to avoid cognitive dissonance, so they shut down discussions and harass people who don’t fall in line.

The discourse isn’t really about Izzy. It never has been. If Canyoneers “just” liked Izzy and enjoyed pairing him with random characters, no one would care. The Izzy Discourse lives on because the Canyon continues to overstate harm, mischaracterize past events or fully ignore things that paint their group in a bad light, tell new fans about the suffering Izzy fans have had to endure, and refuse to accept any discussion about racism or abuse that dares criticize their takes and behavior.

I’m tired.

#481.

#ofmd #our flag means death #izzy hands #fandom critical #canonizzyhours

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ultimate-marysue · 5 months ago

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How I feel my Batfam ships may or may not have children (please don't take me seriously I just need wholesomeness):

Dickkory: multiple bio kids, I'm pretty sure this is canon in some future/alternative universes. I think DC should set Kori free on a PTA meeting with no one explain to her the absurd social rules Karens set. The shitty mothers would hate her because she's over here, playing dumb on purpose until they're forced to admit they're just being annoying/egocentric and not actually asking to better their kid's education. Also, career day would be crazy considering Dick changes jobs every few months to get involved into whatever business he's investigating. Like, one year he's a cop, next he's a super model, next he's a college professor somehow. Kori thinks it's really funny so she insists on Dick being the one to go.

Dickbabs: they either don't have kids (just adopt a bunch of rescues) or maybe have one adoptive kid. Other than Cass who is Babs daughter I don't care what anyone thinks. Just Dick, Barbara and Barbara's daughter who is also Dick's sister. Also, Babs got lucky with Cass being homeschooled, the second she has to deal with the school system she's on the phone with the president blackmailing him to fix it. Easy to say, Dick deals with school exclusively from them on.

BabsDinah: they're the lesbian aunts (that end up doing a lot of the parenting because they can't help themselves). Like, neither of them would really want to have kids of their own, but the second a young vigilante with a shit ton of issues gets dropped in their doorstep it's on. Like, officially they'd be mentors, but they all see each other as family.

Stephcass: Cass is a ticking bomb, she's going to find an ex-murderer kid in need of guidance and just bring them home. Steph is not thrilled at first because they're so young still until she realizes "oh wait no, we're like, adult adults now" and then she has a crisis (unrelated to the child). Also Steph would love love to prove she's better than her father (but would be terrified of messing up). At first they're really chill but soon enough they turn it into a competition with the other Bats. Not a competition between their kids, mind you ("no Cass, that's bad parenting") but a competition of who's the best parent. Jason is terrified of them, but the rest are absolutely down.

Jayroy: asides from our beautiful wonderful and just overall fantastic Lian Harper, I think they might end up adopting some kids. What can I say? I think Jason should have Bruce's adoption gene, but specially for kids in dangerous/hard situations. I'm talking the older kids that never get adopted or younger kids with some sort of disability that need extra accomodations. I think Jason would try very hard to avoid them being vigilantes at least until they're 18. Roy is more chill with vigilantism because well, Lian turned out fine, but he respects Jason's opinion. Most important, no child of his is going to be a Robin to Bruce fucking Wayne. Also, everyone in the PTA would love them, they'd be super involved and Jason would make sure to bribe the appropriate people with muffins.

TimKon: test tube baby, not on purpose though. Like, I don't see Tim as someone actively wanting kids (especially not biological ones) and Kon wouldn't want his kid having to face the problems he did. But like, if Cadmus pulls some weird shit and there's a super baby for the taking, they would both want to make sure they give him the most loving upbringing possible. Another option is Tim accidentally creating their baby while trying to clone Kon while he was dead. That one's plausible and has a lot of angst hurt/comfort potential. Also, Teen Dad Tim after being extremely parentified during his early teens taking care of Bruce (while grieving everyone!) is evil , but a compelling kind of evil. Like a trainwreck you can't look away from.

TimBer: dual income no kids kinda queers. They're over here taking their various nephews to Olive Garden and Disneyland only to drop them off and go live their lovely stress free lives. They may adopt a kid, but that would be only when they really settled down. Let Tim enjoy his 20s (if he ever gets there) my boy has been through enough.

Dukeizzy: again, maybe it's because Duke's still pretty young so he hasn't showed much interest or inclination toward parenting, but I don't have a lot of info to go with. Personally either Dual income "take the kids to do airsoft" kinda uncle/aunt, I can see both of them being really good at giving advice to younger vigilantes (the whole situation of We Are Robin gives you a lot of insight in the power of child vigilantes separated from any mentors, so they're in a particular good spot to mediate between the kids and adults). In the case of them having kids, I think they should inherit Dukes autism (I love that headcanon) and both he and Izzy would be those parents making damn sure their kids get the accommodations they need specially at school. If their kids choose to become vigilantes you bet they're gonna be unionized.

Also, I don't have any particular ship for Damian but you bet that if that boy ever becomes a parent they'd be the softest, sweetest father in the world.

#dickkory #dickbabs #stephcass #dinahbabs #jayroy #timkon #timbern #timber #dukeizzy

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agalychnisspranneusroseus · 4 months ago

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Some headcanons about queer acceptance among the different amphibian species which I came up with for the purposes of my fic

FROGS

There are some rare species of frogs in real life that can change sex according to enviromental pressures. This is true in Amphibia as well. The existance of a biological precedent results in frog culture having a pretty well-established concept of "gender transition" as a normal part of some frogs' lives. This doesn't mean frogs who can change sex can do it on command, or that the change is related to gender identity. It's not, more often than not, but this also means there's a precedent for a frog's gender "not matching" their sex, if someone changes sex involuntarialy. The presence of these frogs, while rare and only found in some regions of the continent, has resulted in the relationship between sex and gender not being self-evident in frog culture. While most transgender frogs can't "naturally transition" and have no acces to either the medical technology or magic to transition physically, they're considered completely normal. Frogs whose sex "doesn't match" their gender because of an involuntary change resulting from enviromental pressures are considered a different identity from frogs who socially transition because their gender identity "doesn't match" their agab, since these are different experiences.

Frogs die like flies, that's just a fact. The average way to die is being eaten by a giant bug before reaching 40. This means that 1) a lot of frogs are orphaned from a young age and 2) parents can't reliably expect their biological children to inherit property. So, adoption is incredibly common. Unlike in the case of newts and toads, biological ties are not a requirement for transmision of lands, property or titles (it's rare for frogs to have titles, but there are some cases), so same-sex couples pose no obstacle in the community's social reproduction. If anything, they're valued precisely due to their inability to have biological children, because it means there will always be a surplus of child-free adults in a community to adopt and protect orphaned tadpoles. A couple without children will be better equipped to care for an orphaned child than a family with lots of children.

Arranged marriages are common, especially in rural areas. Kids will often be engaged to each other from a young age as an agreement between their respective families in order to establish social alliances, protect property and ensure a good social standing. Parents often take into account their children's feelings on the matter and will try to find them an agreeable match, but they're the ones with the final word. Because heterosexual unions are still more common than same-gender ones, most arranged marriages are between male and female frogs. Same-gender arranged unions exist, but they're rare. A young frog is expected to fulfill the arrangement regardless of their sexual orientation, but because the main concern has to do with legal ties of inheritance, some spouses will allow their partners to pursue other people without their families' knowledge.

TOADS

Toad culture is incredibly militarized. They are considered legal adults by age 15 and, through a yearly lottery, many are expected to fulfill 15 years of compulsory military service in a Toad Tower, most likely one far away from where they were born. If your name comes out in the lottery, there are a few ways to avoid having to go. One is being extremely rich and buying your way out of it. Another is being disabled in a way that would incapacitate you to fight. While there are positions in the tower that don't require much physical prowess (there are stewards, tailors, cooks, scribes, accountants etc) these typically require some previous training. The toads drafted are used as foot soldiers. You can always also run away and become a bandit or a mercenary, which is very common. The fourth option is having biological children. Many toads will have children very young and give them up for adoption after a year, which means toad orphanages are brimming with unwanted tadpoles. Those, plus the ones whose parents died. This means adoption is also common in toads, though many of these young toads will grow up in the orphanage before joining a toad tower at age 15 willingly, hoping to make a name for themselves and earn a better life. Now, in a tower, same-sex relationships are actually more widely accepted than heterosexual unions, because a couple having biological children would force their captain to relieve them of their post. It would become an incredibly easy way for soldiers to abandon the towers without being labeled as traitors. There are a few incentives not to try this - a toad that completes their services will be set up for life, but one that doesn't, even through "legal means" such as becoming unable to fight or having children, won't get anything (if that sounds horribly ableist to you, it's because it is. The point is to save resources by providing for as few veterans as possible). If you're an orphan who comes from nothing, you really want to avoid that. Anyway, same-sex couples don't have that problem, so they give their captains less of a headache.

There are no toad species capable of naturally switching sexes, and since their encounters with frogs are often limited unless they live in a frog-majority town, their concept of gender transition is a bit more awkward. Many don't understand the purpose, or think it's a frivolous thing, a waste of time, something for soft-hearted frogs and the toad civilians that become too enamored with them. If it involves lots of introspection and consideration of your own feelings, it's worthless. Sure, they'll respect your pronouns if you insist on it, but they'll probably think you're pathetic and weak.

Toads have very little concept of individuality. The idea of "being your true self" sounds ridiculous to many, because the system crushes a toad's self. Caring about things like identity would make you sound self-important, pretentious, egocentric. A toad does not sit on the window to ponder their feelings. No one cares about their feelings. Sometimes they act on them, but they don't think about them.

Most toads don't own anything. The small portions of land given to veterans return to the Crown once they pass, and their children will have to find somewhere else to live. Many times, they join a tower, because they grant them some stability and security. They don't have titles either. Unless a family manages to buy land and/or property, there is no inheritance. Once a family acquires it, however, preserving the inheritance becomes a big priority. But unlike frogs, ancient laws hailing from the age of the old Toad Lords determine that only biological children may inherit. That means that if a family already has biological children, they're not likely to adopt, because that would only cause trouble and leave their adopted child with nothing. So, most heterosexual couples won't adopt, resulting in most cases of adoption coming from same-sex ones.

This leaves families with same-sex parents at an extreme disadvantage. Many toads will move on from same-sex relationships after their service and settle in heterosexual marriages in order to achieve safety and security. Same-sex relationships are accepted in younger toads, but it's something you're supposed to move on from if you want a stable adult life.

Of course, this is just the "ideal" outcome. "Ideal" cases are rare even among heterosexual unions and many toads lead much different lives after their service: becoming bandits, staying unmarried, sometimes even going to college and pursuing a career. Not to mention that around 1/3 of toads are never drafted at all.

NEWTS

The thing with newts is that they live the most peaceful lives. The most dangerous areas of Amphibia are guarded by the Toad Towers, while newt nobles enjoy the safety of kinder, more gracious lands. Sudden deaths are rare, and orphans are rarer. Even if a child happens to lose both their parents, they will likely have aunts or grandparents to look after them. Adoption is much less common, which makes same-sex couples less important as a social institution.

The other thing! While frogs and toads reproduce through amplexus - a position in which the male lies on the back of the female to rub their cloacas together and inseminate her - which, for the purposes of this analysis, we'll say fulfills a similar role to sex in our world, newts engage in external reproduction. Basically, a male releases a package of sperm called spermatophore, which the female absorbs with her cloaca, without the need for physical contact. Which means that newts don't f*ck. And since reproduction occurs without "sex", they have no need for sexual attraction. Therefore, all newts are asexual (though aromanticism is rare).

Some newts may consider themselves above toads and frogs, who they see as being brutish and impulsive, unable to control their desires. Many toads and frogs see newts as being cold and unloving regarding "sex". Some newts in romantic relationships with frogs or toads may engage in amplexus for the sake of their partners.

There are no newt or salamander species with the ability to change their sex, so newts isolated in Newtopia, who know little of what happens outside the city walls, may have never heard about frogs who can. The concept of a sex change is foreign to them. However, transgender newts do exist and, if they have the money, they have access to the best medical technology Newtopia has to offer, though it doesn't come with the social acceptance found in frog-majority regions.

Same-sex relationships are discouraged among noble folk due to the importance of inheritance, while working-class newts are more likely to engage in same-sex behaviors. Thus, homosexuality is considered something "impulsive" and "inelegant". A general bad idea if you care about your status at all.

SOME NOTES

Queer individuals don't face any extreme form of persecution. Gender transition and same-sex behaviors are strongly discouraged in some situations, but there are no laws prohibiting them and cases of violence against these individuals are practically unheard of.

Toads don't tend to identify with any specific labels, such as "gay" or "transgender", going off more by behavior than identity. A toad is not "gay", they simply practice gay activities.

Frogs do have different terms to identify transgender individuals, but not same-sex attracted individuals, who are also considered not to have any one specific identity but to engage in a varied arrange of same-sex behaviors.

Working-class newts are the ones most attached to the idea of labels and specific identities, while noble newts avoid the irremovability of labels, as they don't want rumors to stain their social standing. It's less world-dooming to be caught engaging in homosexual activities than to be forever labeled as a homosexual.

Arranged marriages between same-sex couples are only heard of among frogs, and even then they're rare.

The scientific term for frogs who can change their sex naturally is "sequential hermaphrodites". This is a very sciency term and while it's not considered offensive, different communities have different words for them. In Frog Valley, they're called "switchies". The Sundews are switchies! While Felicia and Ivy have never changed sex before, it's known that Sylvia has "switched" at least four times in her life! The term they use for transgender individuals who are not sequential hermaphrodites is "false switchies", which sounds bad, but has no pejorative connotations. it simply means the switching is purely social and not physical.

Anne is considered a "switchie" as opposed to a "false switchie" because she did "switch" some of her physical characteristics with the help of Maddie. Witches are very rare, especially in the south, so there are no specific terms for frogs who transition through magic, or even modern newtopian medicine.

#Raised in Amphibia AU #Amphibia #my posts #trans anne boonchuy #extremely niche and specific headcanons

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librarycards · 2 months ago

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I like your point about something being "pretentious," because I also think the term is used only to silence people who are bringing around important ideas.

I've seen you defend the complexity of academic writing in disability studies, which I also love and advocate for. I'm curious, however, about how you make space for people with intellectual disabilities, reading disorders, and other disabilities that make it a lot more difficult to parse overly academic writing. I remember this came up for me specifically when I was reading Jaspir Puar's "The Right to Maim." It's complex, necessarily so, but I found it deeply inaccessible.

I wonder, can disability studies truly be inclusive if it conforms to norms of academic complexity while sacrificing readability and engagement directed towards individuals with intellectual disabilities? I don't know if there's an answer, and I'd love to hear of any recommended reading you have on making space for people who exist outside of traditional modes of academic knowledge and research in a field as diverse as disability justice and Mad studies.

this is a common question, and i'll try my best to do it justice here -

first and foremost, it's important to remember that disability studies is not an activist project, nor is it one primarily concerned with providing social/academic support to individual disabled people per se. it's an academic discipline with roots in critical theory, queer theory, and literary/cultural studies, with its own intellectual genealogy, roster of normative terms, and citational background. when people -- puar, for instance -- write books like 'right to maim,' they're not writing for a general audience, disabled or non-. they're writing for colleagues and students interested in a particular set of arguments, drawing on a particular set of sources, and operating under the assumption that one has already done the (disability studies, ethnic studies, (post)colonial studies) readings - and, if you haven't, that you'll avail yourself of the lit review portion before engaging deeply with the book.

in short, part of the issue many people have when it comes to disability studies and their frustrations with it is that they do not take it seriously as an academic discipline among other academic disciplines. being disabled doesn't make me a disability studies expert any more than being a human makes me an anthropologist. the inaccessibility, as it were, of disability studies is a result of its specialization. this specialization isn't a bad thing - it's what happens when a field has been built over generations, on the shoulders of earlier fields, and requires extensive background knowledge to engage with. there's really no way around that when it comes to niche scholarly disciplines about things deliberately obfuscated in "normal life." this doesn't mean that nothing can be done to support wider uptake of CDS ideas among activists beyond the academy, but it does mean that our collective liberation as disabled people cannot and should not rest on universal understanding of or agreement x y or z element of a specific scholarly text.

that brings me to the next question, which is mostly about bringing disability studies scholarship to disabled people outside the academy, especially those whose disabilities make it difficult to access higher education. i don't think there's a way around reading the difficult texts if you want to be well-read and familiar with disability studies - or any other field - simply because people don't use complex language and syntax for no reason. we need to make up words for things that never had words before. fortunately, however, there are ways to introduce difficult concepts stepwise and in community, namely, through coursework - because as much as these texts weren't meant to be read by non-experts, they were also not meant to be read alone.

in my own experience teaching disability studies to classes wherein many, if not most students, are disabled, the best way of introducing these concepts is with regular old pedagogical tools like scaffolding, introducing background reading, approaching topics socratically, and encouraging group discussion informed by outside reading and personal experience. it is often helpful to go sentence-by-sentence and break down a particularly salient paragraph, or return to a particular citation to understand where one author's points link up with another's. one might go from puar back to saïd, for example, and also forward/sideways to mel chen or nirmala erevelles. put simply, i think reading these works together - in classrooms, in groups, in pairs, or even alongside others who have analyzed them before you (there are tons of analytical essays about most of these books on academia.edu/google scholar for example!) is one of the most reliable ways to improve your comprehension, and is certainly the method i use to help students better understand what they're working with.

lastly, and i think most importantly, i want to stress that the way many undergrads are taught to engage with any theoretical discourse is really, really damaging. it's damaging to expect an eighteen-year-old to consume and instantly "get" ideas that take multiple lifetimes' of debate to get worked out, if ever. being confused, not-knowing, asking questions, getting frustrated, taking a break and coming back -- these are approaches which many disabled students in particular have been pathologized for, but are actually the best (and certainly most predictable) responses one can have to a challenging text. i did not understand a lot of puar the first time i read her. i have read right to maim several times now, and am still puzzling over new things. a great deal could be done to support inclusion in all of our fields if abled/sane/NT people would stop bluffing and admit that they get confused, too; what an opportunity for scholarly interdependence that would be.

anyways....that's a long answer about something i'm very passionate about, so thanks for reading if you did! my main advice is to keep chipping away at challenging texts, because the process of reading and comprehending, especially done in community, is worth it, and helps lay the groundwork / build the muscle for engaging more difficult texts in the future.

as far as more disabled/Mad scholars thinking about academic literacies/classroom accessibility, there's Mel Chen, whose recent monograph, Intoxicated, deals with research, brain fog, and cognitive disability; Margaret Price, OG Mad Studies powerhouse, has also written at length about both pedagogical and personal approaches to mental disability in the classroom, and recently published a book called "Crip Spacetime" that is functionally an exposé on academic inaccessibility of all sorts.

I would also like to strongly recommend my beloved friend and colleague Helen Rottier, who does disability studies scholarship and works at a university disability cultural center, typically with IDD students. We co-authored a paper on Mad pedagogy that should be coming out...someday? Publishing is slow. But definitely check her work and I'm sure she'd welcome questions from you if you wanted to reach out!

#ask #anonymous #academia #reading

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liondrakes · 2 months ago

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Experiencing Transspecies Identity Through Philosophy

by Sivaan of Candlekeep

No blurb. This is a short, self-explanatory one.

Estimated reading time: around five to six minutes

This morning, I decided to chat a bit about being transspecies and why my experience is mostly approached from an ontological angle. Although I’m interested in options that’ll physically align with my identity, I’m not looking to immediately hit these goals. I’ll consider those pursuits when I have the time and money for them, but I’m not in an environment where I can.

Furthermore, that’s not why I label myself as transspecies. When I first considered it, I started out by reading “Transspecies: Two Flags & An FAQ” at the Sundragon’s Roost.

Initially, I was skeptical over whether or not I’d fit the label. It was the first option I considered outside of the alterhuman community. Although plenty of alterhumans use the label (such as myself), I also knew the term took root decades prior to and outside of alterhumanity as we know it today. I wanted to get a basic understanding of the label and its community first.

While reading, this particular passage caught my interest:

“People who choose this label also often have political reasons for doing so– making a statement of refusal of the social construct of humanity, and deliberately drawing comparisons with the transgender experience in order to make people think about how we construct these categories.”

This follows after information regarding physical and/or social transition within the transspecies community. This perspective wouldn’t be the only one I’d find. It came up again in other transspecies readings such as Aster’s “Why I Call Myself Transspecies”:

“What I'm trying to get across is that the status of "human" is socially constructed. It's been granted and taken away based on things like race, ethnicity, disability, orientation, gender, and far more throughout history into the modern day. "Human" and what that means has been looked at in myriad ways by different peoples since homo sapiens could first question our own being. "Human" is not the same as Homo sapiens. And I feel neither.”

“Part of "transspecies" for me is criticizing the mixed messages I'm sent by society as a queer, Mad, crippled, plural, nonbinary alterhuman that I must be human -- but I'm not human and don't deserve to be treated like one. It's saying "fine, I'm not human, and I refuse to be." With the "dehumanization" I've faced, I'm choosing to embrace it. To say "no" to every effort to make me conform to the idea of "human" that is constantly shoved down our throats. To some degree, it's Voidpunk. But that's a very recent stance I've taken on it, and it's far deeper and older than that for me, too.”

“So, "transspecies" comes from two places for me: both a place of "human" as a social/political construct that I reject entirely, as well as an innate and literal part of myself. One rooted in lifelong dysphoria and a deep desire to change my body to resemble inhuman beings that's tied firm to my sense of gender and body.”

For the rest of the essay, Aster goes into detail about faer experiences with dysphoria (species- and gender-wise), how faer gender identity and species identity intertwine, the steps fae wants to take or already has taken to transition, and faer personal thoughts on the pursuit and struggle of attaining body modifications.

This includes seeing a therapist who supports faer identity, gaining tattoos to ease paw dysphoria, and estimating the financial requirements for faer transition ($4,800 upwards for ear-pointing surgery, digileg prosthetics, and other attributes). Although I’m not sure how old this essay is, I still resonate with it to this day.

Similar to Aster, my relationships with species and gender overlap. Each journey began with the realization that I didn’t need to confine myself to the standards of my surroundings. The society in which I live in is culturally Christian, increasingly cisheteronormative, and anthropocentric to its core. Time and time again, it’s been shown that this society doesn’t want any space for individuals like me and my communities. However, not once has that stopped us from embracing our personal autonomy.

Of course, I have my own reasons for using transspecies as a label:

1. My journey with my species identity parallels my gender identity.

Neither were known from the beginning, as much as I try to find signs in my childhood. Regardless, both resulted in my detachment from my society’s ontological “norms”.

2. Much like gender, I believe not only humanity but species as a whole is a construct.

I hold the right to express and interpret my species how I see fit. If I say I am a shapeshifter, then I am a shapeshifter. That should be acknowledged.

3. I resonate with the following definition: “crossing the cultural boundaries of species”. In my case, I am crossing the cultural boundaries of both species and reality.

I am transfictional. I am a fictional character and a member of several fictional species while existing in this world. Typically, your average person won’t believe my existence. After all, fiction is known for containing imaginary events, people, and worlds within its medium. Therefore, fiction isn’t regarded as a part of our reality.

What we define as “reality” can be split into two categories: shared reality and personal reality. The former is something we all exist within and engage in, but what we share doesn’t determine the finer details of one’s personal reality. At the same time, no one is obligated to adopt another’s personal reality but they’re still obligated to respect and coexist with it as long as it isn’t harmful.

Let’s use spiritual belief as an outside example. I am an agnostic animist. I don’t follow a religion, but I do believe that all things contain a spirit of sorts— that includes plants, theriform animals, elements of nature, and inanimate objects. I don’t expect others to adopt my beliefs in order to respect me.

Conversely, do I believe this world was made by a single, all-powerful God? I used to. It’s not my cup of tea anymore. Do I believe in pantheons? I think they make more sense than a single god controlling everything, but nope, still not my cup of tea. My reasoning? I believe we have no set way of proving nor disproving the creation of this world through divinity.

That said, I do believe this world has a supernatural quality to it. In other words, I believe in spirits. Although our beliefs don’t align, I’m not clashing with a devout follower or an atheist. That’s a part of their personal reality. It’s not a part of mine, but I respect it at a distance. No one’s required to add the existence of fictional worlds to their list of beliefs around me. But, basic respect is required if we’re going to interact.

Being a part of this world and in this body doesn’t define me as an individual. I involve myself in the social and political climate of my surroundings, because it will ultimately affect my experiences here. That said, I don’t need to adopt every concept of being as my own in the process— that includes how I’m perceived in this society and the world at large.

4. I challenge the notion that personhood is exclusive to human beings.

Gender and sexuality, for example, are steadily deconstructed in our societies, not only on the basis of personal experience but how these concepts are perceived in our cultures and their social mores. If we’re capable of deconstructing these concepts on such a level, then the same case should be made with the concepts of species and personhood.

Consider those who entirely reject humanity. Now, consider those who experience humanity and nonhumanity as a spectrum, or are already nonhuman and developing their own connection to humanity. What of those who created their species or have no species of their own? Where do those of us belonging to multiple species, with fluctuating species, or experiencing all species at once fall? Personhood is an open concept. Anyone and anything can exist as a person in our societies.

Personhood shouldn’t have to involve human identity unless an individual feels that it is applicable to themselves. Anthropocentrism has governed the concept of being for as long as Earth’s been spinning. By being transspecies, and transfictional no less, my existence contradicts the notion that only humans of this planet and reality can be people.

As mentioned in Aster’s essay, this same demographic has continuously stripped personhood from their own kind on the basis of race, ethnicity, disability, gender and sexuality, and many more concepts. What grounds does humankind have in claiming that only they can be people? Some of humankind’s worst actors don’t recognize more than half of the planet’s population as people because they don’t fit their image of supremacy. This is also touched on in Akhila’s argumentative essay, “On the appropriation of trans narratives by therianthropes”, but under the context of humanity:

“We should also keep in mind that in the past the humanity of some people was denied and some groups were considered closer to nonhuman animals than humans. What constitutes “humanity” has been subject of centuries of philosophical debates, and the boundaries defining “human” has always been rather blurry and shifting depending not only on scientific progress but also on cultural and historical contexts.”

And that’s only covering humanity as a concept, given that it’s treated as synonymous with all things “just” and “civilized”. Never mind the fact that human (species) and person (concept) are also treated as synonymous. Yet, if a human being is denied personhood for the constructs they fall into, where does that leave us?

What makes someone a ‘person’? When personhood can be revoked and redefined so easily by a ruling class, that begs the question of whether or not personhood is truly based in humanity. If humanity is no longer the defining factor, then what is?

Humans can’t argue on the basis of general intelligence, that’s for certain. I’ve discussed in a separate post that plenty of non-sapient animals, such as dolphins and octopi, are incredibly intelligent on their own. As are humankind’s closest living relatives, chimpanzees and other primates. If we were to use intelligence as a metric, not specifically sapience, then that would open up thousands of doors. Anthropocentric thought often ignores the fact that all animals are intelligent, with or without sapience.

Topics such as these are why I consider my transspecies experience to be largely philosophical. We should continue to push the boundaries of species, especially regarding who our societies choose to recognize as people and who they don’t.

#transspecies #transspecies community #alterhuman #alterhumanity #𓃭; the liondrake’s lore

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intersexbookclub · 4 months ago

Text

A lot of thoughts about Cripping Intersex

On 2024-09-29 we met to talk about Chapters 0 and 7-9 of the 2022 book Cripping Intersex by Celeste Orr. This was a book that numerous people had requested we read, and we wound up with deeply mixed feelings about it. 😬

Overall reactions:

Michelle: I found the concept of “hauntology” incredibly compelling. I’m here for some shitposting. 🍵

Apollo: I loved the concept of compulsory dyadism. I found the downplaying of “perisex” as a term to be weird, and the lack of divulging intersex/disability status was weird.

Elizabeth: the lack of diverging intersex/disability status wasn’t just weird, it was anathema to standpoint theory, and so every time Orr cited standpoint theorists, it made me seriously doubt Orr’s understanding of the theoretical basis that they actively chose to use 🧐. I was disappointed by this book. I agree with its central premise, so I should have been an easy sell. Instead I came out shaking, upset, feeling like Orr was a voyeur to our community, that Orr does not actually view intersex studies as a serious research area, that we’re just a theoretical fascination.

Remy: There were a lot of good points about how disability is socially constructed, but how Orr used “bodymind” detracted from their arguments for me. This book had a lot of uncomfortable conversations, some of them I was happy to read, some I need to come to terms with myself, while others I felt were treated a little too artificially equally such as the section with the phrase "the future is female" and the intersex community being involved in the queer community. 🤔

Bnuuy: it's really jarring how they approach the topic. There are a lot of pieces for a good theory here, but it’s kinda like Orr is just like the completely wrong person to go try to assemble them 🫤

As a collective, we generally were receptive (if not enthused!) about the central message that intersex benefits from disability studies/rights/justice perspectives, and that our community would benefit from more interaction with the disability studies/rights/justice communities! 💜

At the same time, we all agreed that Orr felt like a voyeur to our community. Rather than engaging with the intersex community, they seem to have a one-sided relationship where they read a bunch of things by intersex people but never actually conversed with intersex people. Whether Orr is intersex or not matters a whole lot less to us than whether Orr is actively participating in the community.

We made a lot of (unflattering) comparisons of Orr’s book to Envisioning African Intersex by Swarr, an intersex studies book by a perisex author. The latter is a great example of how a perisex scholar can do right by the intersex community: Swarr is clear about being perisex, clearly lays out her motivation for writing the book (she saw medical photography of intersex people, thought it was fucked up, later became friends with intersex activist Sally Gross, and then wanted to honour Gross’ memory after Gross died tragically.) Swarr was clearly connected to multiple African intersex organizations and made an explicit, deliberate choice to publish her book as open access so that the work could actually be read by the African activists she has been working with. Swarr’s perisex status matters a lot less than the fact that Swarr writes in a way that demonstrates personal investment in advancing intersex rights/justice.

Orr may or may nor be intersex. We don’t know. We don’t really care, because Orr doesn’t demonstrate personal investment in the intersex rights/justice/studies communities. That’s what actually matters to us, and it's what a lot of this post is going to talk about.

Underneath the cut we're going to go into a lot more detail about the book. There were things we liked about the book, and want to be fair in our assessment. Some of the complaints we had about the book hinge on an understanding of sociological theory and academic practices, so we'll give some context on those issues.

What we liked

This book had a bunch of things going for it.

The one thing this book did better than Swarr was its use of hauntology. Swarr invokes hauntology in her book, but not nearly as effectively as Orr does. Orr gets a lot of effective mileage out of how the spectre of intersex haunts people’s bodies. Not just intersex people’s bodies, but also the bodies of pregnant people who are called upon to exorcise the spectre of intersex through selective abortion should a foetus be identified as possibly intersex.

The haunting metaphor rung true for talking about how we intersex people are haunted by past surgeries, forced treatments, medical trauma, and so on. Even when we’re “done” with receiving gender-altering “treatments” we live with their ghosts every day.

We liked the explicit connections that Orr drew between intersex and disability studies. Elizabeth in particular was warmed by the shoutout to how Garland-Thompson explicitly includes intersex in her disability studies work. We felt that Orr perhaps underestimates how receptive many intersex people would be to their central argument - Orr takes on a tone of “hey bear with my crazy radical argument” that we weren’t sure was really necessary.

Orr is not the first to make the argument that intersex organizing and scholarship would benefit from more alignment with the disability world. This gets into criticisms, but Orr isn’t the first to make this argument yet seems unaware of how regularly the argument comes up. Indeed there’s a whole chapter in Critical Intersex (2009) arguing that intersex is better off allying with the disability community than the queer community. It’s not hard to find intersex people on this very website arguing similar things. Intersex-support even has a whole section on it in their FAQ, though it does cite Orr (lol). Orr does at least seem aware of Koyama’s work making this argument.

We appreciated Orr calling out ableism in a lot of intersex organizing. When intersex people and organizations insist that intersex is NOT a disorder or disability, they conflate disorder and disability. This is an ableist conflation: disability activism tends to start from a place of resistance to the medical model of disability, whether it be by the social model or more recent ones like the political/relational model.

Intersex activists insisting that intersex is “NOT a disability” reinforce the idea that disability is a negative, tragic thing. It’s the “I’m not like the other girls” rhetoric: putting down people who experience the same oppression you do in an effort to gain some credibility. It holds our movement back, because ableism is a very potent part of how we intersex people are oppressed. Orr does an effective job of laying this out, and we recommend reading the first chapter for this.

Orr coins a term, temporarily endosex, to talk about how people can learn at any age or time that they have had intersex traits all along. (Another way in which intersex can haunt!). For Elizabeth, the idea of temporarily perisex helped zer understand why perisex people can be *so* insistent in defining intersex as something visible at birth: because if intersex is something you can become at any age, this threatens perisex people with the possibility that they too could find themselves on the minority side of the tracks.

Other terms that Orr uses were big hits with the group. Elizabeth loved “curative violence” and ze expects to get future mileage out of the term. Ze also liked the framing of IGM as medical malpractice. Apollo praised “compulsory dyadism” as a concept. Remy shared that the cyborg stuff in the book gave them a lot to think about.

The book features a takedown of eugenicist rhetoric by a bioethicist by the name of Sparrow. We all agreed that Sparrow’s arguments sucked, were grossly eugenicist, and welcomed that Orr had put in the work to rebut his hateful messaging. Michelle praised how they invoked Sparrow’s lists of undesirables that Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis is supposed to prevent: for xem, it evoked monstrosity identification theory and ideas of the abject.

Elizabeth liked Orr’s argument that genital differences are a threat to the heterosexual (perisex) imagination: there’s so much porn out there that incorrectly presents intersex as “typical fully-developed penis plus typical fully-developed vagina” that really reflects how perisex people have a serious lack of imagination about genitals.

Fact Checking

There are a number of things that Orr says that we felt warrant an explicit fact check.

Orr presents the terms “perisex” and “endosex” as though they are contentious within the intersex community. They are not. The general consensus that one’s choice of perisex/endosex/dyadic is a question of personal preference and familiarity.

Orr clearly prefers the term dyadic, and makes a show of casting aspersions on “perisex” and “endosex”. They make it seem like their origins are disputed, and selectively cite Tumblr posts to make this argument. “Perisex” is actually the most common antonym to intersex on this very website, so it feels surreal that they're publishing the rare anti-“perisex” posts on this platform. Orr does correctly cite the Tumblr which coined “perisex”, the issue is they try to discredit it as a means to make it seem like this is not a term embraced by the intersex community.

Orr makes it seem like the origin of “endosex” is a suspicious mystery. It’s not. the term was first used in German in 2000 by Heike Bödeker. Bödeker is controversial for supporting autogynephilia 😬, but we've never seen anybody doubt Bödeker having mixed gonadal dysgenesis.

Orr clearly prefers the term “dyadic” and makes zero attempt to source the term, and the most minimal attempt at covering its controversy. This term actually does come from outside the intersex community! The term came from gender studies, popularized by 1970s radfem Shulamith Firestone. And it’s controversial for more than just being a laundering of “sex binary”.

Nobody calls it “ipso gender” anymore. It was coined as “ipso gender” but in actual usage has been “ipsogender” from basically as soon as the term was coined.

Orr uncritically repeats a quote which romanticizes home births in Black & Indigenous communities as that intersex-at-birth babies were accepted and cared for in a way that wouldn’t happen if the baby were born in hospital. This, sadly, is deserves scrutiny. We’re not saying it never happened: one can find stories supporting it. But the historical and sociological evidence show that infanticide of intersex infants has been widespread globally, and this includes traditional Black and Indigenous birth attendants. Collison (2018) as quoted in Swarr, reports that 88 of 90 traditional South African birth attendants they interviewed admitted to “getting rid” of a child if it was born intersex. That very story we just linked to about a Kenyan midwife saving intersex babies made the news because infanticide was the norm. In North America, some First Nations had similar traditions, e.g. the Navajo would leave intersex babies to die in arroyos, and the Halq’eméylem would leave them to die on a specific mountain. 😢

Michelle was visibly upset when talking about Orr’s repeated comments which insinuate that LGBT marriage equality was an attempt to fit in + liberalism + conformity. In Michelle’s words: “AIDS activists did not watch their lovers die for you to say that marriage equality is conformist bullshit. As a [polyamorous] person who is not legally married to xer spouses, I really felt that one, and I was intensely angry about how Orr was dismissing those activist efforts and the importance of them.”

The Voyeuristic Vibes

The consensus in the group was that Orr’s writing came off as voyeuristic of the intersex community. There were several points in the book where Orr seemed strangely disconnected from the intersex community. Sometimes it was small things, like spelling ipsogender as “ipso gender”, or favouring the term “interphobia” when “intersexism” is actually more popular in the community (it also avoids the potential casual ableism of framing bigots as clinically insane! Which you’d think a crip theorist would be sensitive to…. 👀)

Other times, it felt like a deeper, conceptual thing. For example, Orr’s top priority in future work was to apply their interpretation of intersex issues to critique how LGBT marriage equality was a homonormative, neoliberal, conformist movement. Not only was this viscerally upsetting to Michelle, for Elizabeth it was galling that this is what Orr seems to think intersex perspectives are good for: pushing down other queer groups. 😬 It added to the sense that Orr saw us as a nifty theoretical lens, and wasn’t particularly interested in advancing the intersex cause.

Another disconnection that was noted was in how Orr rebutted Sparrow’s claims that genital differences are disgusting and will not elicit sexual desire in others. Despite detailed rebuttals to other appalling comments from Sparrow, Orr does not bring up the intense fetishization of intersex genital differences which is uncomfortably familiar to all of us. Objectifying medical photography of intersex people with genital differences are shared widely and known to be used for sexual purposes.

Bnuuy was annoyed that Orr seemingly didn't try to talk to or otherwise get input/feedback from any disabled intersex people for their thesis, given that disabled intersex people are not actually that hard to find! (Indeed, four out of five of us are both intersex and disabled.) Given Orr’s emphasis on intersectionality, it’s notable that when they sought intersex texts to analyse, they focused on texts from nondisabled intersex folks.

Orr does not reveal if they are intersex nor if they are disabled. It sticks out. Whether they’re actually intersex or not isn't actually that important to us. We’ve previously read intersex studies works by perisex authors which we loved, and we believe strongly that it is possible for perisex authors to do right by the community if they take the time to engage WITH the community. (See Swarr as an exemplar!)

What we had major problem with is the faux “objective” tone that the book takes on. Orr seems to be trying to hide behind academic language, the “view from nowhere”, and an expensive paywall. This was noticeable to everybody. But Elizabeth, as the only academic in the call, came in with a lot more context as to why it felt gross.

The Misuse of Standpoint Theory

For Elizabeth, Orr's “view from nowhere” became egregious when Orr cites standpoint theorists like Donna Haraway, Nancy Hartstock, and Pat Hill Collins. In a surreal move, Orr explicitly points to Haraway’s famous paper “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”. This paper is an evisceration of the “view from nowhere”, “objective” approach to academic knowledge production. Every view is a view from somewhere, and pretending otherwise feeds into the history of how science has been violently used to gaslight and oppress minority groups.

In short, Haraway says:

Elizabeth explains that as result, feminist methodologies accept subjectivity as part of the process: the researcher is expected to articulate their own standpoint, to be transparent about their subjectivity rather than to hide it behind a pretense of “objectivity”. There’s an emphasis on reflexivity, the fancy word for when scholars reflect on how their own social position affects how they do their research.

Feminist disability studies and crip theory both build on feminist standpoint theory, and Orr claims to be using both. Both frameworks understand disability as socially constructed, and that this social construction is entwined with other social forces such as capitalism, sexism, racism, and so on. Feminist disability studies scholars like Wendell (who Orr cites) clearly position themselves and how their disability (or lack thereof) affects their research.

Crip theory builds further on feminist disability studies, and acts to subvert ideas of ability. It began in the arts - cripping performance art by having wheelchair users perform as dancers, blind people doing photography, Deaf people making music, etc. It spread into other domains, such as crip technoscience. Crip theorists also inherit the tradition of reflexivity, whether it be Eli Claire writing about their personal experiences of disability or Sami Schalk talking about how being nondisabled affects her work as a disability studies scholar.

We provide all this exposition to emphasize how unusual it is that Orr provides absolutely zero information about their positionality nor their personal motivations to this research. 🧐 They provide zero reflexivity as to how their position may have affected their work. Yet their personal biases and subjectivity seemed obvious to us - we were all, in varying ways, set off by Orr trying to pass off subjective opinion as “correct”. As an example, we mentioned how Orr clearly prefers the term “dyadic” and manufactures controversy about the origins of “endosex” and “perisex”, while at the same time conveniently leaving out the unsavoury origins of the term “dyadic”.

Elizabeth pointed out that the ironic thing is Orr didn’t even need to invoke standpoint theory to make the argument that intersex studies would benefit from a disability studies lens. Plenty of intersex and disability studies is done using different frameworks.

Indeed, Elizabeth was surprised that this kind of error made it through a PhD thesis defense. In the department where ze teaches, if a student displays a major misunderstanding about their chosen theoretical framework, the student would be asked to redo the relevant thesis checkpoints (e.g. candidacy paper, thesis proposal/defense) until they get it right.

Some background on academia

Elizabeth brought up a structural problem with the book: it looks like it had zero intersex studies scholars review it prior to publication. 💀

This book originated as a PhD dissertation, which anybody can read for free here. A typical PhD programme is structured as a master-apprentice model of education, where a PhD student apprentices to one (sometimes two) professors. These are known as thesis advisors. The culmination of the PhD is a thesis (aka dissertation), which presents original research done by the student.

To graduate, the thesis needs to pass examination by a committee of professors. The committee acts as a secondary source of support to the student, providing guidance or perspectives to complement the advisors.

Elizabeth explained that when ze assembles a thesis committee for one of zer graduate students, the goal is to ensure any area that the student is venturing into has at least one committee member who is well versed in it. So, let’s say you propose you’re going to do a thesis on “intersex studies meets disability studies” but your thesis advisors are both gender studies people (as Orr’s were). Elizabeth would expect that Orr’s thesis committee would then include at least one disability studies scholar and at least one intersex studies scholar.

Instead, Orr’s thesis committee doesn’t have a single intersex studies scholar on it. Neither the book’s acknowledgements nor the thesis’ acknowledgments acknowledge any intersex studies scholars. Even though Orr is citing intersex studies scholars like Georgiann Davis, Morgan Holmes, and Cary Gabriel Costello, there's nothing to indicate that Orr has ever gotten feedback from any intersex people. This is HIGHLY unusual: normally, intersex studies books have acknowledgments which acknowledge several publicly intersex people, and often one or two intersex organizations.

Research is a highly social activity: researchers are expected to go to conferences, to be in conversation with people working on similar topics. And Orr is clearly social about their research, acknowledging the feminist/gender studies communities they have been a part of. It just seems like intersex studies scholars weren’t a priority for Orr’s academic socializing. 🙃

Orr’s acknowledgments doesn’t even contain the word intersex, which is unprecedented in our collective experience of intersex non-fiction. This is why Elizabeth says that ze was left with the impression that Orr doesn’t think intersex studies is a serious field of research. It appears that Orr views intersex literature as something to be consumed for their benefit, and not a community worthy of participation and a bi-directional relationship.

Early in the book, Orr points to Lennard Davis’ work with the Deaf community on reframing Deaf activism away from the “we’re not disabled we’re a linguistic minority” rhetoric. It’s a great example of disability studies scholars having an impact. Thing is: Davis openly talks about how he grew up in a Deaf family that was part of the Deaf Community. While Davis is not little-d deaf, he took on the project as a member of the capital-D Deaf community. His writing (including book acknowledgments) reflect this.

Elizabeth also pointed out that there are scripts and precedent in academia for how to handle positionality and reflexivity when you’re questioning or closeted. If Orr were closeted or questioning, they would have an excellent way to talk discreetly about it through their very own concept of “temporarily endosex”: Orr could write they don’t know they’re not perisex, frame it around how few perisex people actually know they’re perisex, and retain plausible deniability.

Other notes

Bnuuy was frustrated with the implication that disability studies is The Only Right Way to analyse intersex. It’s a useful lens for understanding intersex, but at times it felt like Orr was arguing it was the only appropriate lens rather than one of a collection of suitable lenses. Theories are analytic tools, and social phenomena are complex and fluid - it’s a matter of finding a suitable tool for a given research question, rather than there being One Correct Way to understand things.

Orr’s use of “bodymind” didn’t quite land. The term was created by Margaret Price to subvert the idea that body and mind are dichotomous: many disabilities cannot neatly fit into “mental” vs “physical”. It’s a term that’s had productive use in disability studies. But Orr’s use of it got a negative reaction. Remy pointed out it felt like it instead it actually reinforced the body-mind distinction. Intersex is, after all, a physical thing, and the idea of “brain intersex” is very poorly received by the intersex community - it’s seen as a way that perisex trans people appropriate intersex and/or live in denial about being perisex. It felt like Orr was using the word on autopilot rather than thinking about when and where it is actually subversive.

Bnuuy was concerned that Orr was reading OII Australia’s information on intersex in bad faith. Orr criticizes them for discursively distancing intersex from disability. Bnuuy points out that OII Australia is not writing for an academic (disability studies) scholarship. This is an advocacy organization speaking to a general audience that understands disability through the medical model. Bnuuy read the quotes from OII Australia as them just distancing themselves from a medicalized understanding of disability.

Elizabeth brought up that Orr’s manufactured controversy of “perisex” may have a classist element. While endo- does make sense as an antonym to inter- if one has formal science background, the term peri- is not conventionally an antonym to inter-. Elizabeth has personally noticed a resistance from zer fellow academics to perisex on the grounds that it’s “using scientific terminology incorrectly”, and thinks that’s a classist take.

Michelle brought up that “it also didn't sit great with me that they [Orr] were very condescending about Tumblr like, ‘aww, look at the baby activists trying to do a scholarship," whereas what I'd describe as ‘folk scholarship’ on Tumblr has been very valuable to me. It's not always correct and there can be misinformation, but it has worth.” Remy was unimpressed with how limited/selective Orr’s engagement seemed to be with intersex Tumblr, as well as Orr’s centrist take on “the future is female”.

Closing thoughts

This was a deeply imperfect piece of scholarship. Orr came across as disconnected from the intersex community, and uninterested in working with the community. The work still has some merits: Orr’s first chapter provides an incisive discussion of how ableism is detrimental to intersex advocacy and that trying to distance intersex from disability only adds to societal ableism. Ableism is a serious force in intersex discrimination and we’re stronger off understanding this and explicitly resisting it.

We hope that the stink of Orr’s voyeurism does not sully the important central message of their book. Work needs to be done to teach more intersex people about disability studies. Disability does not mean disorder. Disability does NOT mean medical problem. The disability rights and justice movements are FULL of disabled groups who, just like the intersex community, are actively seeking de-pathologization, bodily autonomy, patient-led care by respectful and well-informed physicians, and fighting neo-eugenics. We are in good company with groups like the Deaf, neurodiversity, and little people communities.

#oh also reminder: we're meeting on Friday to talk about Wicked!#intersex book club #intersex books #intersex #actually intersex #intersex studies #queer theory #crip theory #standpoint theory #disability studies #academia #crip #book reviews #book review #book summaries

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