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happy pride, i subtitled this classic for the guiris

PLUMA PLUMA GAY: Parody by los Morancos (2007)

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my uterus before and after preservation ☺️

since i chose to keep her intact for the preservation, i wasn't able to send her to pathology to be dissected, so i'll never know what her fucking problem was. now she's in this globe so i can shake her for everything she did to me. you can't tell the scale in these photos but the globe is 3 inches in diameter.

done by wildflower.oddities in portland, oregon 🦋

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hello

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beachcombing

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Something took a cartoonishly large chomp outta her head

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Just heard that a city council member in Seattle ran for city council because a small concrete barrier was put up in front of his children's school to stop illegal u-turns which he has likened to Trumps Border Wall

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CosmicBloom　宇宙に咲く

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the drowning machine

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a printer error is an attempt from god to get you to kill yourself but you must be stronger and you must must must beat the printer to death with a large object like object

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Beelieve it or not, this blue bee is the real deal! 🐝 Meet the blue carpenter bee (Xylocopa caerulea). This large bee can reach lengths of up to 1.1 in (2.8 cm); compare that to a European honey bee which typically grows up to 0.7 in (1.8 cm) long! Unlike honeybees, this critter doesn’t live in large hives, but instead spends most of its time alone. This insect can be found in parts of India, China, and Southeast Asia where it plays an important role in pollinating its habitat.

Photo: Cheongweei Gan, CC BY-NC 4.0, iNaturalist

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sunrise

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half baked morning rant

I do want to make it clear that the reason I talk about HRT and its biological effects so much is not because HRT or medicalization defines your gender.

Its because, for me personally, the interface of my biology education and my transition was mostly centered around figuring out what sex hormones do. I learned about basic biology principles like DNA organization, gene regulation, cell biology, and physiology in high school and undergrad. Taking that understanding and extending it to the mechanisms that hormones use to change gene regulation, and by extension, the rest of your body broadly, was something I did as my understanding became more complete in later undergrad and grad school. It was the key to me starting my own transition.

Why?

Because it was the first time I realized that the "basic biology" arguments of transphobes were complete and utter bullshit. From that point, it was a cascade. As in, wait, if dynamic changes in gene expression aren't considered "biological" to them, then why am I believing anything they say about anything else? When they talk about gametes, and try to include infertile cis people in their definitions of biological sex by talking about what gamete you're "intended" to make, what do they even mean? Why does my current gene expression not define that "intent"? And wait, back up, why is the brain suddenly not considered part of our biology? Why are neurological differences suddenly not "biological"? Why can we say someone's thinking patterns aren't "biological"?

Backing up even further, why does any of this matter more than psychological gender, or sociological gender? If the way we navigate society is gendered, that affects a lot of our lives, and we're just throwing that away?

Basically, being educated about how deep the biological changes of HRT really go was the first domino to fall when I worked through my internalized transphobia.

This is one of many reasons why I hate, hate HATE the concession that uninformed allies and even many trans people themselves give: "well NO ONE is saying that you can change your biological sex, sex and gender are completely unrelated, sex is binary and gender isn't!!!!!"

Well. I am saying that you can change your "biological" sex, I am saying that biological sex isn't binary, and I am saying that misunderstanding of those points has set back transgender advocacy. It makes medical decisions surrounding us less informed, it poisons conversations about how we interact with society, and it makes trans people feel like their gender and sex are less "real" than cis people's.

Not to mention the horrific way it discards intersex people from the conversation entirely.

Recently, I've seen this point enter the mainstream a little, by using intersex people and variation of sex in other species as a "counterargument" to "binary biological sex" thinking. It still doesn't sit right with me. One, because it uses intersex people as a prop for trans advocacy while not actually addressing the needs of either group. And two, because it completely disregards that your current biology and physiology is not 100% predestined from birth, and using people who were "born this way" as a prop does absolutely nothing to increase people's acceptance of trans people who change their biology later in life.

Ugh. This got away from me but yeah. That's my sipping coffee ramble for this morning. If anyone wants to add comment or correct me on discourse here, please do. Especially if you're intersex- this is all the observations of a perisex trans woman.