#Non-mainstream news

[serach-bat-asher]

i feel like a lot for me is clicking and i just can't with the AZ world anymore. the response to the p*ger thing has been balls to the walls insane

[shoechoe]

again no hate but i feel like mcr fans like to pretend its less popular than it is sometimes

[frobby]

synthV teto actually makes me so happy cuz not only is she back but SHES GOOD! Shes joined the league of mainstream vocaloids with gumi, vflower, kafu and miku of course. Sue used to be an april fools joke in the shadow of miku but now she stands on the same stage even upstaging her we love to see a girl living her dreams

[cakebatteronabrickwall]

I'm so sorry but Marvel Disney is never gonna give you the queer rep you want. It's a corporation. The potential loss of money in other markets matters much more to them than you. That being said, pirate the shit out of their content. Peace and love✌

[onemillionfurries]

tbh i give Tumblr like 2 years max before it goes bankrupt and shuts down

[starstuffandalotofcoffee]

I feel like there's two levels of chronically online. There's like, the variety where you recognize obscure memes and stupid drama and post constantly but have some sort of tether to reality and have friends in the real world and read the news from time to time, and then there's the kind where you genuinely don't realize that your political position or feelings about popular media are not just non-mainstream but actively fringe and that it's not emotional labor to pick people up from the airport.

[cookinguptales]

So I’ve been enjoying the Disney vs. DeSantis memes as much as anyone, but like. I do feel like a lot of people who had normal childhoods are missing some context to all this.

I was raised in the Bible Belt in a fairly fundie environment. My parents were reasonably cool about some things, compared to the rest of my family, but they certainly had their issues. But they did let me watch Disney movies, which turned out to be a point of major contention between them and my other relatives.

See, I think some people think this weird fight between Disney and fundies is new. It is very not new. I know that Disney’s attempts at inclusion in their media have been the source of a lot of mockery, but what a lot of people don’t understand is that as far as actual company policy goes, Disney has actually been an industry leader for queer rights. They’ve had policies assuring equal healthcare and partner benefits for queer employees since the early 90s.

I’m not sure how many people reading this right now remember the early 90s, but that was very much not industry standard. It was a big deal when Disney announced that non-married queer partners would be getting the same benefits as the married heterosexual ones.

Like — it went further than just saying that any unmarried partners would be eligible for spousal benefits. It straight-up said that non-same-sex partners would still need to be married to receive spousal benefits, but because same-sex partners couldn’t do that, proof that they lived together as an established couple would be enough.

In other words, it put long-term same-sex partners on a higher level than opposite-sex partners who just weren’t married yet. It put them on the exact same level as heterosexual married partners.

They weren’t the first company ever to do this, but they were super early. And they were certainly the first mainstream “family-friendly” company to do it.

Conservatives lost their damn minds.

Protests, boycotts, sermons, the whole nine yards. I can’t tell you how many books about the evils of Disney my grandmother tried to get my parents to read when I was a kid.

When we later moved to Florida, I realized just how many queer people work at Disney — because historically speaking, it’s been a company that has guaranteed them safety, non-discrimination, and equal rights. That’s when I became aware of their unofficial “Gay Days” and how Christians would show up from all over the country to protest them every year. Apparently my grandmother had been upset about these days for years, but my parents had just kind of ignored her.

Out of curiosity, I ended up reading one of the books my grandmother kept leaving at our house. And friends — it’s amazing how similar that (terrible, poorly written) rhetoric was to what people are saying these days. Disney hires gay pedophiles who want to abuse your children. Disney is trying to normalize Satanism in our beautiful, Christian America. 

Just tons of conspiracy theories in there that ranged from “a few bad things happened that weren’t actually Disney’s fault, but they did happen” to “Pocahontas is an evil movie, not because it distorts history and misrepresents indigenous life, but because it might teach children respect for nature. Which, as we all know, would cause them all to become Wiccans who believe in climate change.”

Like — please, take it from someone who knows. This weird fight between fundies and Disney is not new. This is not Disney’s first (gay) rodeo. These people have always believed that Disney is full of evil gays who are trying to groom and sexually abuse children.

The main difference now is that these beliefs are becoming mainstream. It’s not just conservative pastors who are talking about this. It’s not just church groups showing up to boycott Gay Day. Disney is starting to (reluctantly) say the quiet part out loud, and so are the Republicans. Disney is publicly supporting queer rights and announcing company-supported queer events and the Republican Party is publicly calling them pedophiles and enacting politically driven revenge.

This is important, because while this fight has always been important in the history of queer rights, it is now being magnified. The precedent that a fight like this could set is staggering. For better or for worse, we live in a corporation-driven country. I don’t like it any more than you do, and I’m not about to defend most of Disney’s business practices. But we do live in a nation where rights are largely tied to corporate approval, and the fact that we might be entering an age where even the most powerful corporations in the country are being banned from speaking out in favor of rights for marginalized people… that’s genuinely scary.

Like… I’ll just ask you this. Where do you think we’d be now, in 2023, if Disney had been prevented from promising its employees equal benefits in 1994? That was almost thirty years ago, and look how far things have come. When I looked up news articles for this post from that era, even then journalists, activists, and fundie church leaders were all talking about how a company of Disney’s prominence throwing their weight behind this movement could lead to the normalization of equal protections in this country.

The idea of it scared and thrilled people in equal parts even then. It still scares and thrills them now.

I keep seeing people say “I need them both to lose!” and I get it, I do. Disney has for sure done a lot of shit over the years. But I am begging you as a queer exvangelical to understand that no. You need Disney to win. You need Disney to wipe the fucking floor with these people.

Right now, this isn’t just a fight between a giant corporation and Ron DeSantis. This is a fight about the right of corporations to support marginalized groups. It’s a fight that ensures that companies like Disney still can offer benefits that a discriminatory government does not provide. It ensures that businesses much smaller than Disney can support activism.

Hell, it ensures that you can support activism.

The fight between weird Christian conspiracy theorists and Disney is not new, because the fight to prevent any tiny victory for marginalized groups is not new. The fight against the normalization of othered groups is not new.

That’s what they’re most afraid of. That each incremental victory will start to make marginalized groups feel safer, that each incremental victory will start to turn the tide of public opinion, that each incremental victory will eventually lead to sweeping law reform.

They’re afraid that they won’t be able to legally discriminate against us anymore.

So guys! Please. This fight, while hilarious, is also so fucking important. I am begging you to understand how old this fight is. These people always play the long game. They did it with Roe and they’re doing it with Disney.

We have! To keep! Pushing back!

[aletterinthenameofsanity]

Y'know, there's this gripe I've had for years that really frustrates me, and it has to do with Love, Simon and people joking about it and calling it too-pg and designed-for-straight-people and all the like. (A similar thing has happened to Heartstopper, but that's another conversation.)

I saw Love, Simon in theaters when it came out my senior year in high school. I saw it three times, once with my friends/parents on opening night, once with my brother over spring break, and once with my grandparents.

On opening night, the air in the room was electric. It was palpable. Half the heads in there were dyed various colors. Queer kids were holding hands. We were all crying and laughing and cheering as a group. My friends grabbed my hands at the part where Simon was outed and didn't let go until his parents were saying that they accepted him. My friend came out to me as non-binary. Another person in our group admitted that she had feelings for girls. It was incredible. I left shaking. This was the first mainstream queer romance movie that had ever been produced by one of the main five studios, and I know that sounds like another "first queer character from Disney" bit but you have to understand that even in 2018 this was groundbreaking. Getting to have a sweet queer rom-com where the main character was told that he got "to breathe now" after coming out meant so much to me and my friends.

But also, from a designed-for-straight-people POV (which, to be frank, it was written by a bisexual author and directed by a gay man, this was not designed for straight audiences), why is it a bad thing that it appealed to the widest possible audience? That it could make my parents and grandparents see things in a new light? My stepdad wasn't at all interested in rom-coms but he saw it with me because it was something I cared about and he hugged me when we came out of the theater. My very Catholic grandparents watched it with me and though my grandpa said he still didn't quite understand the whole 'gay thing,' all he wanted was for me to be happy and to have a happy ending like Simon did. My Nana actually cried when Simon came out and squeeze my hand when his mother told him he could breathe.

And when Martin blackmailed Simon, my mom, badass ally that she is, literally hissed "Dropkick him. Dropkick him in the balls" leading to multiple queer kids in the audience to laugh or smile. Having my parents there- the only parents, by the way, out of my group of queer and questioning friends- made multiple people realize that supportive adults were out there. That parents like those in Love, Simon do exist in real life.

When people complain about Heartstopper not being realistic or Love, Simon being too cutesy, I remember seeing Love, Simon on opening night. I remember my friend coming out and my stepdad hugging me and my mom defending us through this character. I remember the cheers that went through the audience when Bram and Simon kissed and the chatter in the foyer after the movie was over and the way that this movie made me understand that happy endings do exist.

Queer kids need happy endings. Straight people need entry points to becoming allies. Both of these things can come together in beautiful ways. They can find out about more queer culture later, but for now, let them have this. Let them all have a glimpse at a better, happier world. Let them have queer joy.

[fullhalalalchemist]

URGENT: 🚨🚨EARN IT ACT IS BACK IN THE SENATE 🚨🚨 TUMBLR’S NSFW BAN HITTING THE ENTIRE INTERNET THIS SUMMER 2023

April 28, 2023

I’m so sorry for the long post but please please please pay attention and spread this

What is the EARN IT Act?

The EARN IT Act (s. 1207) has been roundly condemned by nearly every major LGBTQ+ advocacy and human rights organization in the country.

This is the third time the Senate has been trying to force this through, and I talked about it last year. It is a bill that claims "protects children and victims against CSAM" by creating an unelected and politically appointed national commission of law enforcement specialists to dictate "best practices" that websites all across the nation will be forced to follow. (Keep in mind, most websites in the world are created in the US, so this has global ramifications). These "best practices" would include killing encryption so that any law enforcement can scan and see every single message, dm, photo, cloud storage, data, and any website you have every so much as glanced at. Contrary to popular belief, no they actually can't already do that. These "best practices" also create new laws for "removing CSAM" online, leading to mass censorship of non-CSAM content like what happened to tumblr. Keep in mind that groups like NCOSE, an anti-LGBT hate group, will be allowed on this commission. If websites don't follow these best practices, they lose their Section 230 protections, leading to mass censorship either way.

Section 230 is foundational to modern online communications. It's the entire reason social media exists. It grants legal protection to users and websites, and says that websites aren't responsible for what users upload online unless it's criminal. Without Section 230, websites are at the mercy of whatever bullshit regulatory laws any and every US state passes. Imagine if Texas and Florida were allowed to say what you can and can't publish and access online. That is what will happen if EARN IT passes. (For context, Trump wanted to get rid of Section 230 because he knew it would lead to mass govt surveillance and censorship of minorities online.)

This is really not a drill. Anyone who makes or consume anything “adult” and LGBT online has to be prepared to fight Sen. Blumenthal’s EARN IT Act, brought back from the grave by a bipartisan consensus to destroy Section 230. If this bill passes, we’re going to see most, if not all, adult content and accounts removed from mainstream platforms. This will include anything related to LGBT content, including SFW fanfiction, for example. Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Tumblr, all of them will be completely gutted of anything related to LGBT content, abortion healthcare, resources for victims of any type of abuse, etc. It is a right-wing fascists wet dream, which is why NCOSE is behind this bill and why another name for this bill is named in reference to NCOSE.

NCOSE used to be named Morality in Media, and has rebranded into an "anti-trafficking" organization. They are a hate group that has made millions off of being "against trafficking" while helping almost no victims and pushing for homophobic laws globally. They have successfully pushing the idea that any form of sexual expression, including talking about HEALTH, leads to sex trafficking. That's how SESTA passed. Their goal is to eliminate all sex, anything gay, and everything that goes against their idea of ‘God’ from the internet and hyper disney-fy and sanitize it. This is a highly coordinated attack on multiple fronts.

The EARN IT Act will lead to mass online censorship and surveillance. Platforms will be forced to scan their users’ communications and censor all sex-related content, including sex education, literally anything lgbt, transgender or non-binary education and support systems, aything related to abortion, and sex worker communication according to the ACLU. All this in the name of “protecting kids” and “fighting CSAM”, both of which the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact it makes fighting CSEM even harder.

EARN IT will open the way for politicians to define the category of “pornography" as they — or the lobbies that fund them — please. The same way that right-wing groups have successfully banned books about race and LGBT, are banning trans people from existing, all under the guise of protecting children from "grooming and exploitation", is how they will successfully censor the internet.

As long as state legislatures can tie in "fighting CSAM" to their bullshit laws, they can use EARN IT to censor and surveill whatever they want.

This is already a nightmare enough. But the bill also DESTROYS ENCRYPTION, you know, the thing protecting literally anyone or any govt entity from going into your private messages and emails and anything on your devices and spying on you.

This bill is going to finish what FOSTA/SESTA started. And that should terrify you.

Senator Blumenthal (Same guy who said ‘Facebook should ban finsta’) pushed this bill all of 2020, literally every activist (There were more than half a million signatures on this site opposing this act!) pushed hard to stop this bill. Now he brings it back, doesn’t show the text of the bill until hours later, and it’s WORSE. Instead of fixing literally anything in the bill that might actually protect kids online, Bluemnthal is hoping to fast track this and shove it through, hoping to get little media attention other than propaganda of “protecting kids” to support this shitty legislation that will harm kids. Blumental doesn't care about protecting anyone, and only wants his name in headlines.

It will make CSAM much much worse.

One of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous: It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works – without fear of liability for any “failure.” Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with. This liability would allow anyone for any reason to sue any platform they want, suing smaller ones out of existence. Look at what is happening right now with book bans across the nation with far right groups. This is going to happen to the internet if this bill passes.

(Remember, the state department released a report in December 2021 recommending that the government crack down on “obscenity” as hard the Reagan Administration did. If this bill passes, it could easily go way beyond shit red states are currently trying. It is a goldmine for the fascist right that is currently in the middle of banning every book that talks about race and sexuality across the US.)

The reason these bills keep showing up is because there is this false lie spread by organizations like NCOSE that platforms do nothing about CSEM online. However, platforms are already liable for child sexual exploitation under federal law. Tech companies sent more than 45 million+ instances of CSAM to the DOJ in 2019 alone, most of which they declined to investigate. This shows that platforms are actually doing everything in their power already to stop CSEM by following already existing laws. The Earn It Act includes zero resources for proven investigation or prevention programs. If Senator Bluementhal actually cared about protecting youth, why wouldn’t he include anything to actually protect them in his shitty horrible bill? EARN IT is actually likely to make prosecuting child molesters more difficult since evidence collected this way likely violates the Fourth Amendment and would be inadmissible in court.

I don’t know why so many Senators are eager to cosponsor the “make child pornography worse” bill, but here we are.

HOW TO FIGHT BACK

EARN IT Act was introduced just two weeks ago and is already being fast-tracked. It will be marked up the week of May 1st and head to the Senate floor immediately after. If there is no loud and consistent opposition, it will be law by JUNE! Most bills never go to markup, so this means they are putting pressure to move this through. There are already 20 co-sponsors, a fifth of the entire Senate. This is an uphill battle and it is very much all hands on deck.

CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES.

This website takes you to your Senator / House members contact info. EMAIL, MESSAGE, SEND LETTERS, CALL CALL CALL CALL CALL. Calling is the BEST way to get a message through. Get your family and friends to send calls too. This is literally the end of free speech online.

(202) 224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline. Here is a call script if you don't know what to say. Call them every day. Even on the weekends, leaving voicemails are fine.

2. Sign these petitions!

Link to Petition 1

Link to Petition 2

3. SPREAD THE WORD ONLINE

If you have any social media, spread this online. One of the best ways we fought back against this last year was MASSIVE spread online. Tiktok, reddit, twitter, discord, whatever means you have at least mention it. We could see most social media die out by this fall if we don't fight back.

Here is a linktree with more information on this bill including a masterpost of articles, the links to petitions, and the call script.

DISCORD LINK IF YOU WANT TO HELP FIGHT IT

TLDR: The EARN IT Act will lead to online censorship of any and all adult & lgbt content across the entire internet, open the floodgates to mass surveillance the likes which we haven’t seen before, lead to much more CSEM being distributed online, and destroy encryption. Call 202-224-3121 to connect to your house and senate representative and tell them to VOTE NO on this bill that does not protect anyone and harms everyone.

[lesbian-moon-gf]

I'm sick of corporate news and mainstream conversations about Is rael's assault being discussed in a Zionist framework.

There is no context in which bombing a hospital, let alone multiple, is justified.

There is no context in which adults and children should be coralled into an even smaller area to be bombed is justified.

There is no context in which Is rael can murder civilian men, who are fathers, lovers, friends, humans, is justified.

There is no context in which a family should die one by one in a car, in which two Red Crescent workers are killed trying to save the surviving 6 year old, in which the 6 yr old is left pleading for help until she too is murdered is justified.

What we need to say is this: Is rael is committing genocide under the cover of war. The United States is providing the bombs while claiming its non involvement. Is rael is a settler colonial project and Palestinians are paying the price.

[foldingfittedsheets]

I feel like one of the major ways sex ed failed me was the utter lack of discussion about vaginal discharge. Around 13 I started just… leaking fluids. It was on a set schedule, every day after lunch there’d be an uncomfortable wetness down the front of my underwear.

It was awful. Every movement was wet and cold unpleasantness in my pants. I’d go stuff toilet paper into my underwear and it would pill up and stick to my damp skin. That went on for a year.

I finally discovered panty liners and started wearing them daily, but with the unconscious fear that the overall juiciness of my pussy was unnatural.

I’d read people saying that cotton underwear would dissipate moisture and stop it from being a problem but no amount of natural fibers could evaporate what my crotch was producing. Since that wasn’t enough for me I worried I was abnormal.

I didn’t like wearing panty liners every day. It felt sweaty and wasteful but the alternative was to be wet and miserable. I still worried about it. But when I finally asked a doctor they just asked if it was more than my usual discharge. I said, no, it’s always been this way. They shrugged and assured me that meant my body was behaving reliably. Also if your discharge discolors your underwear that’s also normal cause of chemistry reasons

That reassurance didn’t come until my 20’s.

Finally a few years ago I discovered cloth liners. They’re reusable and clip into the crotch of underwear. I was ecstatic to finally have a non disposable option. I love them. Although the mainstream ones have polyester wings and I’m very excited to try the new all cotton ones I just got off Etsy. I think they were originally intended as light period protection but were robust enough for me.

So if you’ve ever worried about how wet your pussy is: it’s normal. It’s self cleaning, it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. You should worry when the amount changes and if you’re like me check out cloth liners, they’re excellent.

[korax]

.

[hell0mega]

it's incredible that tumblr fandom went from DESPERATELY trying to see ANY sort of queer love in the shows we liked, to having shows—high budget, well-made, interesting, mainstream shows staring known actors—that are ABOUT queer love. explicitly, without argument. and just ten years later.

i saw (and reblogged) a post about how GO, ofmd, and wwdits are the new superwholock and i havent stopped thinking about it. cuz i was there, i was in the trenches back in the day. i was there when the writers and actors made fun of us for seeing on screen chemistry and perfect stories to set up romances. they all humored us then shat on us and saw us as a joke. a bunch of weirdo faggy teens that don't think two men can just be friends.

and now look at us. we're seeing the on screen chemistry and it's REAL. it's ON PURPOSE. these ARE romantic stories about queer people. we're not projecting or have wishful thinking... it's TRUE!! it was written and directed and edited and acted that way in earnest. i will take NO SHIT regarding these shows and people's love for them.

and do you know WHY these shows are being made now? these well thought out, feels-real, non-pandering queer stories? it's BECAUSE OF WHAT WE DID ten+ years ago. a lot of queer media never got the green light to be made because execs don't think there's enough of an audience. that more people will dislike the gays than like them. and we've shown them that that's unequivocally untrue. the outcry we had for all those years, the reviews we left, the statements we made, the backlash, it gave show runners ammunition to say "hey. people will watch this. they will like it. let us make it."

[communistkenobi]

Would you be willing to dunk on speak more on mainstream feminist theory you're reading? And/or share some of the non-juvenile feminist theory you've read?

(Note: I will try to link to open access versions of articles as much as possible, but some of them are paywalled. if the links dont work just type the titles into google and add pdf at the end, i found them all that way)

If there’s any one singular issue with mainstream feminist thought that can be generalized to "The Problem With Mainstream Feminism" (and by mainstream I mean white, cishet, bourgeois feminism, the “canonical feminism” that is taught in western universities) it’s that gender is treated as something that can stand by itself, by which I mean, “gender” is a complete unit of analysis from which to understand social inequality. You can “add” race, class, ability, national origin, religion, sexuality, and so on to your analysis (each likewise treated as full, discrete categories of the social world), but that gender itself provides a comprehensive (or at the very least “good enough”) view of a given social problem. (RW Connell, who wrote the canonical text Masculinities (1995) and is one of the feminist scholars who coined/popularized the term hegemonic masculinity, is a fantastic example of this.)

Black feminists have for many decades pointed out how fucking ridiculous this is, especially vis a vis race and class, because Black women do not experience misogyny and racism as two discrete forms of oppression in their lives, they are inextricably linked. The separation of gender and race is not merely an analytical error on the part of white feminists - it is a continuation of the long white supremacist tradition of bounding gender in exclusively white terms. Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought (2000) engages with this via a speech by Sojourner Truth, the most famous line from her speech being “ain’t I a woman?” as she describes all the aspects of womanhood she experiences but is still denied the position of woman by white women because she is Black. Lugones in Coloniality of Gender (2008) likewise brings up the example of segregationist movements in the USAmerican South, where towns would put up banners saying things like “Protect Southern Women” as a rationale for segregation, making it very clear who they viewed as women. Sylvia Wynter in 1492: A New World View likewise points out that colonized women and men were treated like cattle by Spanish colonizers in South America, often counted in population measures as "heads of Indian men and women," as in heads of cattle. They were treated as colonial resources, not as gendered subjects capable of rational thought.

To treat the category of “woman” as something that stands by itself is a white supremacist understanding of gender, because “woman” always just means white woman - the fact that white is left implied is part of white supremacy, because who is granted subjecthood, the ability to be seen as human and therefore a gendered subject, is a function of race (see Quijano, 2000). Crenshaw (1991) operationalizes this through the term intersectionality, pointing out that law treats gender and race as separate social sites of discrimination, and the practical effect of this is that Black women have limited/no legal recourse when they face discrimination because they experience it as misogynoir, as the multiplicative effect of their position as Black women, not as sexism on the one hand and racism on the other.

Transfeminist theory has further problematized the category of gender by pointing out that "woman" always just means cis woman (and more often than not also means heterosexual woman). The most famous of these critiques comes from Judith Butler - I’m less familiar with their work, but there is a great example in the beginning of Bodies That Matter (1993) where they demonstrate that personhood itself is a gendered social position. They ask (and I’m paraphrasing) “when does a fetus stop becoming an ‘it’? When its gender is declared by a doctor or nurse via ultrasound.” Sex assignment is not merely a social practice of patriarchal division, it is the medium through which the human subject is created (and recall that gender is fundamentally racialized & race is fundamentally gendered, which I will come back to).

And the work of transfeminists demonstrate this by showing transgender people are treated as non-human, non-citizens. Heath Fogg Davis in Sex-Classification Policies as Transgender Discrimination (2014) recounts the story of an African American transgender woman in Pennsylvania being denied use of public transit, because her bus pass had an F gender marker on it (as all buss passes in the state required gender markers until 2013) and the bus driver refused her service because she “didn’t look like a woman.” She was denied access to transit again when she got her marker changed to M, as she “didn’t look like a man.” Transgender people are thus denied access to basic public services by being constructed as “administratively impossible” - gender markers are a component of citizenship because they appear on all citizenship documents, as well as a variety of civil and public documents (such as a bus pass). Gender markers, even when changed by trans people (an arduous, difficult process in most places on earth, if not outright impossible), are seen as fraudulent & used as a basis to deny us citizenship rights. Toby Beauchamp in Going Stealth: Transgender Politics & US Surveillance Practices (2019) talks about anti-trans bathroom bills as a form of citizenship denial to trans people - anti-trans bathroom laws are impossible to actually enforce because nobody is doing genital inspections of everyone who enters bathrooms (and genitals are not proof of transgenderism!), but that’s actually not the point. The point of these bills is to embolden members of the cissexual public to deputize themselves on behalf of the state to police access to public space, directing their cissexual gaze towards anyone who “looks transgender.” Beauchamp points out that transvestigators don’t need to be accurate most of the time, because again, the point is terrorizing transgender people out of public life. He connects this with racial segregation, and argues that we shouldn’t view gender segregation as “a new form of” racial segregation (this is a duplication of white supremacist feminism) but a continuation of it, because public access is a citizenship right and citizenship is fundamentally racially mediated (see Glenn's (2002) Unequal Freedom)

Susan Stryker & Nikki Sullivan further drives this home in The King’s Member, The Queen’s Body, where they explain the history of the crime of mayhem. Originating in feudal Europe (I don’t remember off the dome the exact time/place so forgive the generalization lol), mayhem is the crime of self-mutilation for the purposes of avoiding military conscription, but what is interesting is that its not actually legally treated as “self” mutilation, but a mutilation of the state and its capacity to exercise its own power. They link the concept of mayhem to the contemporary hysteria around transgender people receiving bottom surgery - we are not in fact self mutilating, we are mutilating the state’s ability to reproduce its own population by permanently destroying (in the eyes of the cissexual public) our capacity to form the foundational social unit of the nuclear family. Our bodies are not our own, they are a component of the state. Situating this in the context of reproductive rights makes this even clearer. Abortion access is not actually about the individual, it is the state mediating its own reproductive capacity via the restriction of abortion (premised on the cissexual logic of binary reproductive capacity systematized through sex assignment). Returning to Hill Collins, she points out that in the US, white cis women are restricted access to abortion while Black and Indigenous cis women are routinely forcibly sterilized, their children aborted, and pumped with birth control by the state. This is not a contradiction or point of “hypocrisy” on the part of conservatives, this is a fully comprehensive plan of white supremacist population management.

To treat "gender" as its own category, as much of mainstream feminism does (see Acker (1990) and England (2010) for two hilarious examples of this, both widely cited feminists), is to forward a white supremacist notion of gender. That white supremacy is fundamentally cissexual and heterosexual is not an accident - it is a central organizing logic that allows for the systematization of the fear of declining white birthrates (the conspiracy of "white genocide" is illegible without the base belief that there are two kinds of bodies, one that gets pregnant and one that does the impregnating, and that these two types of bodies are universal sources of evidence of the superiority of men over women - and im using those terms in the most loaded possible sense).

I realize that most of these readings are US centric, which is an unfortunate limitation of my own education. I have been really trying to branch into literature outside the Global North, but doctoral degree constraints + time constraints + my own research requires continual engagement with it. I also realize that most of the transfeminist readings I've cited are by white scholars! This is a continual systemic problem in academic literature and I'm not exempt from it, even as I sit here and lay out the problem. Which is to say, this is nowhere near the final word on this subject, and having to devote so much time to reading mainstream feminist theory as someone who is in western academia is part of my own limited education + perspective on this topic

[homoquartz]

why is no one talking about the fact that nex benedict is indigenous?

they are choctaw.

native women and two-spirits are at the highest risk of sexual assault and domestic violence of any group. natives as a whole are at the highest risk for suicide. natives are also tied with Black americans for risk of being killed, both by police and by others.

it's critical to note that more than 90% of violence done against natives is committed by non-natives. this is a colonial issue, it's a genocide issue, it's an anti-indigenous issue.

when it comes to indians, our intersectional identities are often erased in favor of more visible or mainstream marginalizations like sex and gender.

this same thing happened when ezra miller kidnapped an indigenous teen. it happened when a nurse assaulted a native coma patient and she became pregnant and gave birth in her hospital bed. our indigenous identity is barely mentioned, despite this being a multinational crisis.

please learn more about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement here, here, and here

and please spread the word about this

don't let native people disappear in this conversation. nex's death is national news and they should be remembered for all that they are.

[qqueenofhades]

I am FULLY ONBOARD the Harris/Waltz train, tho before this i was leaning towards Mark Kelly (AZ is a swing state! He's an ASTRONAUT!) If you want or have time, no pressure, but any thoughts on what makes Waltz a better pick?

I like Mark Kelly too, and since he's married to Gabby Giffords (having run for public office after she got shot and could no longer do so) he would have been an amazing pick in terms of supporting the first female POTUS. But he is a less charismatic public speaker than Walz (for whatever that's worth, but politics is a mess of Aesthetics and Vibes that matter as much and/or more than actual facts) and more moderate/conservative. He's been a great senator and picking him would defuse some of the BORDER IMMIGRATION BLAH BLAH!!! scaremongering that Republicans love to run on, but it would also leave open the possibility of losing a special election and other dangers with the Democratic senate that we really need to minimize. So Walz is a better choice for that alone, but also:

He really has serious progressive credentials as governor, even if he was a fairly mainstream Democrat (who flipped a rural red House district in Minnesota that Democrats have not been able to win again after he left) during his 12 years in the House. This is an INCOMPLETE LIST of what he was able to do in two years with a one-seat Democratic majority in Minnesota:

A Climate Action Plan that included:

Investing in energy infrastructure

100% carbon-free electricity by 2040 goal

Transition off of fossil fuels and onto clean energy resources

Building more electric vehicle charging stations

Providing funding to help workers acquire new skills through apprenticeship programs in clean energy fields

Direct state funding for transit

Money for rail

Tax credit for e-bikes

Permitting form to fast-track clean energy projects

And that was in addition to:

Codified abortion access in Minnesota

Guaranteed paid sick time and paid family and medical leave

Funded replacing ALL LEAD PIPES IN THE STATE

Free school breakfasts and lunches for all

Made public college free

Stronger labor protections

Drivers’ Licenses for All

Voting Rights Act to reverse recent court rulings that make voting harder, including restored voting rights to convicted felons

Banning medical debt from credit bureaus

The "Taylor Swift Bill" requiring all ticket "junk fees" be shown up front

Banning most "junk fees"

No book bans

Protection for tipped workers

Banned non-competes

Legalized recreational cannabis

Gun control, including increased penalties for straw purchases of firearms, expanded background checks and enacted red-flag laws, passing gun safety measures that the GOP has thwarted for years

Made MN a Trans Refuge State, and required health plans to cover “medically necessary gender-affirming care.”

Pay increase for Uber and Lyft drivers

Elimination of the so-called “gay panic defense”

A ban on “doxxing” election workers

A prohibition on “swatting” elected officials

In March, during the height of the Gaza/uncommitted primary protests against Biden, Walz said that young people should be listened to and they had a right to be speaking up and the situation in Gaza was horrible and intolerable, without directly slamming Biden or getting involved in the issue in a way to draw negative headlines. Regardless of what you think about any of it, that is a very deft way to handle it and pairs well with Kamala's better responsiveness on the Gaza issue overall. That was a big part of the reason why Gen Z/younger voters were very excited about Walz despite him being an "old" (actually the same age as Kamala but he has joked that teaching high school for 20 years will do that to a guy) white guy. If half the battle in politics is making the right pick to excite your core voters and reach out to new ones, then Harris nailed it. As I have said in earlier posts, there was just too much energy with young voters FINALLY checking in when Harris became the candidate, to risk introducing a big ideological split with Shapiro.

Aside from that: the most insufferable Smart White-Bro Political Pundits (TM) are big mad about Walz, many Never Trumper Republicans thought they were entitled to a "moderate" in exchange for oh-so-generously lending us their vote against Trump and not run the risk that we might end up with someone *gasp* progressive, and the regular MAGA Republicans are hysterical, which means they're terrified. It's also incredibly hard to paint Literal Midwestern Stereotype Dad (football coach, social studies high school teacher, military veteran, etc) as THE EVIL END OF AMERICA in the way they desperately want to do, though the fact that they're trying shows that they've got literally nothing. The fact that Kamala picked Walz against the PREVAILING WISDOM!!! that she had to take Shapiro (for whatever reason that might have been) is also a good sign, because by far the most genuine and extensive enthusiasm that I have seen from Democratic voters, especially those feeling burned out or disillusioned or angry with specific policy choices of the current administration, was for Walz. Having everyone excited for the pick beforehand, effectively using the "weird" line, and rallying behind the guy, only for her to actually go for him, is inspiring. It makes people feel like they're being heard and the Democrats have decided to win by being progressive, and not just endlessly Catering To The (Imaginary) Middle as they have always been told to do (and often done). That alone is MASSIVE.

Walz is tremendously funny, personable, has Democrats from AOC to Joe Manchin praising it (again, shocking), was right out the gate supporting Kamala, has already been majorly successful on TV, was by far the most progressive-on-policy picks of the VP finalists, is incredibly, hilariously wholesome and small-town Midwestern (he's the JD Vance that they wish JD Vance was), and is already sending ActBlue gangbusters with donations again. And when you're getting this kind of response on the Cursed Bird Hellsite, just:

Just. I don't know what's happening either. But let's enjoy it, and then work hard, because we gotta fucking do this and for possibly the first time this entire year, I really think we might. Heck yeah.