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Happy butch appreciation day to...

The working class butches, transmasc butches, transfem butches, butches of colour, baby butches, butch elders, stone butches, he/him butches, nonbinary butches, lesboy butches, butch4femmes, butch4butches, butch boyfriends, butch girlfriends, the list goes on and on and on.

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Transactional Intercourse: A Trans and Intersex Sex Worker Survey!

Fill out the survey here!

This survey is for people who are trans and/or intersex and have either sold sex or made porn. Current and former sex workers are equally welcome!

I strongly encourage non sex workers to share this survey, particularly if you are intersex and/or trans or have followers who are. The larger the sample size, the more accurate and diverse the representation of our experiences will be.

The purpose of these questions is to get a snapshot of your experiences in sex work, alongside some demographic information that makes it easier to see patterns in how transmisogyny, racism, classism, ableism and homophobia all intersect to impact sex workers' outcomes. Information collected through this survey will be used to inform the writing and themes for Transactional Intercourse, an anthology of trans and intersex sex workers' writing. If you're interested in being paid to contribute, you'll be given the opportunity to give your e-mail at the end when submissions open.

If you'd like to be notified when the project launches or want read a little more about the concept behind the anthology, you can do so on the Kickstarter pre-launch page for Transactional Intercourse!

About the creator behind this project: I'm Jack (he/they), a trans sex worker, activist, and author. I have experience in sex work over the last decade ranging from brothel work to online porn creation and have worked with various sex worker rights organisations over the years. I previously edited and published Working Guys: A Transmasculine Sex Worker Anthology and would love to create an even larger project this time that gives voice to a wider range of marginalized sex workers.

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shapeshift!

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Why I am done saying "I hate men"

By @ lioxaviera (she/her).

Video transcript below:

I'm trying to break a really bad habit, and that bad habit is saying "I hate men" because I don't hate men.

I hate the patriarchy. I hate sexism. I hate homophobia. I hate white supremacy. I hate racism. I hate transphobia. I hate fascism. I hate capitalism. I hate evil power structures, which are held up by men who benefit from patriarchy.

(Bc patriarchy — Stockholm syndrome)

And I hate the way that patriarchy forces men to participate in it in order to maintain their sense of self.

But there are many, many wonderful individual men. I know men with high degrees of integrity—who do the work, who understand that they are not the only people on this earth who count as people. But it's a really hard habit to break because sometimes it feels like I hate men, because there are so many men who do not know how to separate themselves from the power structures that benefit them.

And I am positive that the same thing can be true with me and whiteness.

But I really need to stop saying "I hate men" because I don't hate men—I hate what they benefit from, and I hate the way they do not divorce themselves from it when they don't.

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If this discourse has taught me anything it’s that we desperately, desperately need to support and prop up transmasculine voices in academia and queer theory so there can be actual foundational texts that take our experiences into account, from the perspective of someone with those experiences. In fact, if anyone has any recommendations of transmasc academics/writers I’d love to use this post as an opportunity to spread them and their works around!

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In contrast with professional drag queens, who were only playing at being women onstage, [Esther] Newton learned that the very bottom of the gay social hierarchy was the province of street queens. In almost total contrast to professional queens, street queens were "the underclass of the gay world." Although they embraced effeminacy, too, they did so in the wrong place and for the wrong reason: in public and outside of professional work. As a result, Newton explained, the street queens "are never off stage. Their way of life is collective, illegal, and immediate." Because they didn't get paid to be feminine and were locked out of even the most menial of nightlife jobs, Newton observed that their lives were perceived to revolve around "confrontation, prostitution, and drug 'highs'." Even in a gay underworld where everyone was marked as deviant, it was the sincere street queens who tried to live as women who were punished most for what was celebrated-and paid-as an act onstage. When stage queens lost their jobs, they were often socially excluded like trans women. Newton explained that when she returned to Kansas City one night during her fieldwork, she learned that two poor queens she had met had recently lost their jobs as impersonators. Since then, they had become "indistinguishable from street fairies," growing out their hair long and wearing makeup in public-even "passing" as girls in certain situations," in addition to earning a reputation for taking pills. They were now treated harshly by everyone in the local scene. Most people wouldn't even speak to them in public. Professional drag queens who didn't live as women still had to avoid being seen as too "transy" in their style and demeanor. One professional queen that Newton interviewed explained why: it was dangerous to be transy because it reinforced the stigma of effeminacy without the safety of being onstage. "I think what you do in your bed is your business," he told Newton, echoing a middle-class understanding of gay privacy, "[but] what you do on the street is everybody's business."

The first street queen who appears in Mother Camp is named Lola, a young Black trans girl who is "becoming a woman,' as they say'." Newton met Lola at her dingy Kansas City apartment, where she lived with Tiger, a young gay man, and Godiva, a somewhat more respectable queen. What made Godiva more respectable than Lola wasn't just a lack of hormonal transition. It was that Godiva could work as a female impersonator because she wasn't trying to sincerely live as a woman. Lola, on the other hand, was permanently out of work because being Black and trans made her unhireable, including in female impersonation. When Newton entered their apartment, which had virtually no furniture, she found Lola lying on "a rumpled-up mattress on the floor" and entertaining three "very rough-looking young men." These kinds of apartments, wrote Newton, "are not 'homes.' They are places to come in off the street." The extremely poor trans women who lived as street queens, like Lola, "literally live outside the law," Newton explained. Violence and assault were their everyday experiences, drugs were omnipresent, and sex work was about the only work they could do. Even if they didn't have "homes," street queens "do live in the police system."

As a result of being policed and ostracized by their own gay peers, Newton felt that street queens were "dedicated to "staying out of it" as a way of life. "From their perspective, all of respectable society seems square, distant, and hypocritical. From their 'place' at the very bottom of the moral and status structure, they are in a strategic position to experience the numerous discrepancies between the ideals of American culture and the realities." Yet, however withdrawn or strung out they were perceived to be, the street queens were hardly afraid to act. On the contrary, they were regarded by many as the bravest and most combative in the gay world. In the summer of 1966, street queens in San Francisco fought back at Compton's Cafeteria, an all-night venue popular with sex workers and other poor gay people. After management had called the police on a table that was hanging out for hours ordering nothing but coffee, an officer grabbed the arm of one street queen. As the historian Susan Stryker recounts, that queen threw her coffee in the police officer's face, "and a melee erupted." As the queens led the patrons in throwing everything on their tables at the cops-who called for backup-a full-blown riot erupted onto the street. The queens beat the police with their purses "and kicked them with their high-heeled shoes." A similar incident was documented in 1959, when drag queens fought back against the police at Cooper's Donuts in Los Angeles by throwing donuts-and punches. How many more, unrecorded, times street queens fought back is anyone's guess. The most famous event came in 1969, when street queens led the Stonewall rebellion in New York City. Newton shares in Mother Camp that she wasn't surprised to learn it was the street queens who carried Stonewall. "Street fairies," she wrote, "have nothing to lose."

Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny

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San Diego LGBTQ Pride Parade (1999) Lambda Archives of San Diego

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Audre Lorde, from "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" (1981)

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THIS IS A CALL TO ACTION. Censorship affects all of us, and if Project 2025 gets its way, the entire trans publishing industry is at a significant risk of criminalization. In this article, I lay out the problem and the stakes, and suggest a broad action plan with dozens of potential response ✊

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from the 1996 edition of TransFagRag, a newsletter for gay and bisexual trans men, via The Digital Transgender Archive

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My zine in the lineage of Fucking Trans Women by Mira Bellwether, about my anatomy as a trans woman who's had nullification surgery. It started as a user manual for a partner but I believe it has value beyond that.

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About half of those who voted said “no”, and many said “nuance”. Really interest in hearing all of these perspectives!

Our understanding of transsexualism is complicated by a certain degree of confusion and ambivalence about sexuality. In broad terms, sexuality can be seen as having four essential components: Genetic identity is the chromosomal gender of the individual. Gender identity is the self-percep- tion of one's core as being male, female, or in-between - "I am male/female." Gender role is the whole list of expectations about behaviors, occupations, interests, values, emotional reactions, and cognitive approach that each culture customarily expects of individuals on the basis of what gender they seem to be. Sexual orientation has to do with the gender of those toward whom one is romantically or sexually attracted. Life might be simpler if people adopted one equation, such as, "I am genetically female; I feel female inside; I do female things; I am attracted to males." But, because all of these components of sexuality can be independent, the result is a 4x4 interaction chat generates 16 distinct possibilities of sexual identity (Friend, 1987).

AEGIS Offprint #1006: Gender Dysphoria Update, 1996

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10 Most Damaging Myths about Transmen and FTMs

All FTMs come from the lesbian community, and after transition are heterosexual. (that is, attracted to women)

Transsexualism/transgenderism can be "cured" by psychotherapy. Transsexual men are really just lesbians.

FTMs did not exist until after World War II,with the advent of hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery.

Female-to-Males are far rarer than Male-to-Female transsexuals.

Transmen seek to live as and be recognized as male in order to obtain male privilege and economic advantages.

All transmen exhibit stereotypically male behavior and want to be as macho as possible.

Taking testosterone makes Female-to-Male transsexuals much more aggressive and angry than they were before taking hormones.

All FTMs want genital reconstruction as the driving force of their transition. (not necessarily the social aspects that go along with masculinity)

Historically, all women only chose to live as men to pursue careers that were otherwise unattainable to them, to seek economic opportunities, or to justify lesbian relationships.

Transmen are really just butch lesbians who change sex

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this pride, i learnt about the Palestinian trans woman Oscar Al-Halabiye, dancer and resistance fighter against the israeli occupation in Southern Lebanon. she named herself Oscar after Lady Oscar from the "The Rose of Versailles", a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Riyoko Ikeda.

her story is documented in Cinema Fouad(1993). zionists use pink washing to reinforce their genocidal terrorist narrative when queer Palestinians have been fighting against the occupation since the very beginning. you can watch it here with english subtitles. long live the intifada!

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from Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury, by JM Bernstein

Silencing: In torture and rape, there occur forms of silencing that, in both cases, result in a breaking of the victim’s “linguistic will,” as it may be called— that is, the power to word the world for themselves, to speak the world as it appears to them and for them. In torture, the torturer attempts to take direct control of the victim’s linguistic will, to orchestrate its responses, while nonetheless desiring that the victim’s speech be veridical. Paining, as the means of achieving this end, routinely overshoots, leading to the destruction of the power of speech generally, forcing a regression into the expressive noises of groans, howls, yelps, and whimpers. In rape, the victim’s protestations are taken as nil, or what is nearly the same, taken to mean the opposite of what such words (and gestures) normally mean, hence leading the victim to discover that her words have stopped meaning at all. Linguistic silencing is the way in which the victim’s loss of an inten-tional relation to the world— which, again, is part of the grammar of acute pain— becomes manifest.

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I don't think it's oppressive that people complain about bi women having straight boyfriends at pride, but it is definitely annoying. "I don't feel safe because he's straight" okay and I don't feel safe that your white lesbian girlfriend is consistently racist 👀 we gone get rid of her too 👀 or do we only care about the complaints and the support needs of a few 👀 like if we gone talk people making other people in the LGBTQ community feel unsafe then let's get to brass tacks

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Got a few similar messages like this, so I think it’s time to make a little resource list about everything transgender related:

Basics:

Legal status of Transgender people - list of countries and their various transgender rights

Queer and Trans Spectrum Definitions - basic reference guide to common words

Non-surgery options:

Gender Affirming Gear and Clothing Brands - definitions, methods without surgery and brand suggestions

Voice training:

Masculinize your voice - Transmasculine voice - FtM voice Training (all for pre-T)

E-girl voice tutorial - Girl voice tutorial - How to do a girl voice - How to do the druew voice

Tips & Tricks:

How to hide a large chest - FtM passing tips - FtM make up - coping with being pre-T

Boy to Girl make up tutorial (beginner) - Boy to Girl Transformation tutorial - The Transfemme Field Guide

HRT:

Masculinizing Hormone Therapy - taking testosterone, how it works and what to expect

Feminizing Hormone Therapy - taking estrogen, how it works and what to expect

FtM Surgery Options & Details:

Top Surgery - removal of breasts

Facial masculinization - facial surgery

The Difference Between a Metoidioplasty and a Phalloplasty - masculinizing bottom surgery

Deciding between phalloplasty and metoidioplasty PDF - masculinizing bottom surgery

MtF Surgery Options & Details:

Breast Augmentation - breast implants

Voice feminization - vocal cord surgery

Facial feminization - facial surgery

Vaginoplasty - feminizing bottom surgery (with vaginal canal)

Vulvoplasty - feminizing bottom surgery alternative (without vaginal canal)

Note: there are no explicit images, however some sites offer additional links to stores that sell realistic looking private parts or links to surgeon galleries where one can view post-op results (which come with proper warnings)