#imagine hearing that a trans woman from a country actively trying to kill her is running away and passing through Ukraine and your reaction

[featherymainffins]

What the fuck man

[1010ninetynine]

there's no single point. it's a mess. I'm not quite sorry.

I read Haikei, Seken-sama, the story of a trans man, and now I feel wrecked emotionally. I'm going to talk about it on tumblr dot com because no one else will hear this. well, it's not like the abyss of social media responds all the time. most of my moots like watching men kiss so idk if this even smacks for em. i mean there's one man doing the kissing? eventually? we don't even see it.

It's based on the author's experience living his life. The thought terrifies me to no end.

With this lead up you might think people die in this manga. No, no one does. No violence either. Definitely not as scarring as Banana fish, arguably.

Let me talk to you. Woman to algorithm.

Sorry if it's triggering.

The very first chapter features a kid with short hair putting on a school uniform, checking the skirt length, putting on chapstick, looking in the mirror and describing a creature in a skirt. They rush to school. Perfume is forced onto them. They try to wash it off. It's not coming off. She's accepted she's late, she walks at an even pace. She's accepted that despite everything she's a woman. And seeing the fate of an ugly girl, being treated as something to ignore and mock, she knows that she must be normal. It's better to be normal.

I say this without a shred of irony - Rino Tachibana feels like an alternate version of me. I mean, he ends up transitioning to be a male, and he seems like he gets laid more than I ever will. but that's boring talk.

the point is that I, like most people I imagine, hate and love the thought of being normal. of people not looking at me like im a weirdo. of being constrained by everyone's rules. they carve their way into my heart and thus engrave themselves into my soul. i want to be seen as a masculine figure but that's just not possible as a woman without being weird. i aim for the next best thing and it's not all that great. I've settled for being seen as a weirdo.

But Rino wanted to be a man. His name becomes Kanesho at the end of the manga.

She also loved Hanako, and knew Hanako wouldn't love her. She didn't conform to gender roles from an early age.

The truth is this is something that gays are known for, being unable to conform to society's expectations. there's people who argue that transition is a way to escape sexism/homophobia to an extent and I want to argue with those people that no, there are gnc gay men and women who just exist. I want to tell them that obviously no one would transition just for homophobia when I know so many who transitioned and ended up being gay because of it.

That's not consistent with the reality of the situation. If you're interested in women, and you prefer masculine activities, of course you'd want to be a guy. I know i've wanted my boobs gone as a teenager, hell, even now they bother me but I fucking ignore it. It's only natural, especially in a conservative country like Japan. I can't just like...fucking deny that. I can't deny that in countries like Iran, that might be your only option as a gay person if you want to, I dunno, fucking LIVE.

So yeah. It's definitely possible that a lot of trans people transition out of sexism/homophobia.

And that literally, in text, what is being described (not that Japan would kill her for liking girls if she didn't transition). Rino wants to be a guy to play soccer with the other boys, she doesn't like makeup and other feminine things, and doesn't like her feminine frame. Rino wants to be a guy because that's the only way she'd have a chance with Hanako.

Rino then tries to find someone for her crush so Hanako wouldn't be with anyone, only to get the wrong guy. She ends up dating him as a way to continue being with Hanako. She then breaks up with him because she knows she's not being honest + because she's masculine the guy's getting called gay for dating her and she feels like she's done something wrong.

I won't ascribe good or bad to Rino/Kanesho. I will say that what led to her living an honest life where he didn't have to suppress his desires was becoming more masculine (wearing a suit to graduation, and accepting that they kicked him out for it, transitioning medically and eventually getting a hysterectomy so he can call himself a Real Man).

I'm not saying this to blame Kanesho for his decisions, again I'm not sure what's right or not in these situations. I think they made him happy and in any case, he's not hurting a soul.

It just feels...it feels so fucking tragic is what it is. Rino would have never wanted to transition if her parents just let her be masculine. If she wasn't told that as a woman, liking other woman was wrong. And the truth is, this will fucking affect his life. He will not live as long, he's more at risk for osteoporosis, and several other health risks, all of this mentioned in manga btw. And he's accepted it because he's so happy living like this.

And how could he not? People don't judge him when he expresses interest in masculine activities, for dating girls, he's free to be himself. He just had to render himself infertile and at risk for numerous medical conditions, pay a hefty fee, and accept a reduced lifespan.

I don't misgender people who are real. I understand how fucking miserable it can be, and dysphoria's difficult to deal with. So, I use preferred pronouns and I generally try to avoid making people dysphoric. Rino/Kanesho Tachibana is not real, so I'm being honest about how I see her/him. I'm truly sorry if this bothers you - but I won't change that.

I too have looked in the mirror and hated what was there. I know what it's like to hate yourself so thoroughly transition seems like the only solution. And truth be told, I only didn't because I realized that if I continued T for long enough, a hysterectomy would be like...medically necessary. Vaginal atrophy would happen and I'd have to self lubricate. All of which, beyond my means personally.

what's my point? i don't have one really. haikei seiken sama was incredible.

[honeylikewords]

They took a perfectly good start and turned it into the white evil guy is just misunderstood and needs the love of the right woman crap, completely screwing up pretty much everything else. Poe deserved better. Finn deserved better. Rose deserved better. Heck, even Rey deserved better than being shoved together with him. It sucks, and I'm over it. And all the actors didn't deserve a single second of hate because they weren't white.

Yep.

I’ve been very vocal about my feelings on the many failings of the SW sequel trilogy, both as failures politically and failures as just cohesive narratives, but hearing firsthand, straight from John, exactly how much he endured because of not only the story-based racism perpetuated against him but the actual on-set and directorial racism that was also active against him is just...

Like, I want to be shocked. I’m horrified, I’m disgusted, and I’m angry, but what more can I expect from people who tokenize, dismiss, and humiliate Black people as an industry? These people don’t value him as an actor, as a talent, or as even a human person to treat with basic social dignity. I can’t fake surprise when I know that this industry, this country, this world runs on the fuel of delegating Black people to “less-than” status. Christ.

I really don’t know how to get through to people that rooting for R*ylo from the get-go was just such an insidiously white-centric, shitty move. I won’t even deny it with “let people ship what they want” politeness anymore: the narrative was setting up a FinnRey endgame, and people pushing so hard for a white, abusive, Neo-N*zi character to “earn his redemption” by being “loved better” by a white woman, shutting the Black male lead out of the film and out of the relationship he was supposed to build over the course of the coming films, was racist. It is racist.

I don’t care if people like Adam Driver. I like him too-- he’s a great actor and, from all accounts, a nice guy-- but liking him or thinking he’s handsome doesn’t excuse narratively rejecting a Black man in favor of a violent, totalitarian, abusive, white man who was a LITERAL NEO-N*ZI PARALLEL. 

And the creative teams, LucasFilm, Disney, whoever listened to all the petulant white fans demanding to see the white people kiss caved to racism. They fed the fire and look where it got them. 

It’s vile, it’s low, it’s degrading, it’s nothing less than a hollow placation of white fantasies at the expense of genuine progress and of even the most basic structures of storytelling.

We were promised a growing dynamic between a female Jedi and a Black Jedi. We were supposed to see their bond grow and evolve. We were supposed to see their characters develop and strengthen and watch them tear down a fascist empire.

But what we got was pandering to white people, pandering to heteronormative expectations, and racist action taken against the very small handful of Black and brown actors who had finally broken through in a heavily white-dominated fandom space. 

Kelly Marie Tran was bullied off of social media, harangued and harassed, and had her character relegated to brief blips in the following film because the team behind the film caved to the racist mudslinging perpetrated against her.

Oscar Isaac had his character reduced to a heteronormative DRUG DEALER, despite having CHANGED HIS LAST NAME so that he would stop being typecast in drug dealer roles. He has even said that if he knew what was going to happen to Poe, he would have let them kill him off in the first movie like JJ Abrams had originally suggested. 

And John.

What else can I say except that my heart burns and breaks and aches for him and everything he’s been through? What could I say that he hasn’t said?

I’ll drop this quote from his interview: “His primary motivation is to show the frustrations and difficulties of trying to operate within what can feel like a permanently rigged system. He is trying, really, to let you know what it feels like to have a boyhood dream ruptured by the toxic realities of the world.”

He has been so strong in his push back against this system and the people who seek to harass and belittle and dehumanize him and for that I am so grateful and I look up to him with intense admiration, but, God, I wish he didn’t have to. I can’t imagine what this must have been like behind closed doors. What must have been going on for him in private, in his heart and head and soul as he had to just sit there and smile and watch his big break get smeared in front of him, as vitriol and hate and death threats flooded his inbox for no reason other than him having the audacity to be Black.

I love the characters. I love parts of the movies and I’ll rewatch them and cobble together my own canon and enjoy what brings me love and warmth and happiness, and continue to support and promote characters like Finn and Poe and Rose and, hell, even my own version of Rey. Force Awakens is still an objectively great Star Wars film and a comfort of mine and a window into the future we could have had with these amazing characters.

But absolutely fuck every single person who contributed to tearing down the people of color in this series, and fuck every single person who harassed their actors, and fuck every single person that put all their energy into supporting Kylo Ren and his goddamn waste of a ‘redemption arc’ instead of giving a single thought to the Black man who should have been given his due depth.

And go John Boyega; every new project he takes on, I’m gonna be there watching and supporting as best I can. He’s more than damn well earned it.

[secretgamergirl]

Hate Mobs Gotta Go

Last night, I did something I have never expected to do, and just full on gave up on a fun RPG writing assignment. Which I had to do because I hit a point where it was so overdue and unfinished that I was falling asleep sitting up and stress vomiting and other such things. There’s a whole lot of factors behind that. Other health issues, the toll of being on total pandemic lockdown for months, with neighbors just straight up open mouth coughing at my door, emergencies with friends and family, multiple fires and hardware failures, but the main thing was, and still is, the constant harassment from a militant hate mob, completely out of touch with reality.

Years ago, I remember there was this thing the internet at large was fond of doing with foaming at the mouth far right religious extremists- Mercilessly ridiculing them in public to expose how disconnected everything they said or did was from reality. Remember seeing this one float around and laughing your head off?

And if I mention the Westboro Baptist Church, you immediately picture a single family of raving bigots picketing funerals and such with their big homophobic signs, with a bigger crowd mocking them, right?

For some reason, the modern version of that particular flavor of fringe weirdo doesn’t get that sort of ridicule. Presumably because they’re focusing almost exclusively on trans people, and most people have this weird thing where like if you stick up for trans people you get cooties or something and never dig into the real juicy ridicule fodder. But for real, this stuff is OUT THERE. Just look at a few examples here.

Come for the weird ravings about harvesting baby organs. Stay for the... adult woman who apparently believes breasts get their shape from actually being sacks filled with milk under women’s skin? Now, how about this colorful comparison?

For anyone who wasn’t aware, pronouns are words like “I” “you” “he” “she” “it” and “this,” while rohypnol is colloquially known as “the date rape drug,” so this is utter gibberish. The full context of course is that this person is trying to make the argument that forcing this bigot to refer to women she’s prejudiced against as “she” instead of arbitrarily tossing around “he” or “it” is... raping her brain, I guess?

So... this is pretty clearly some creep’s weird little fantasy. The obvious giveaway is pretending that trans women “aren’t in the correct bathroom” when going to... the correct bathroom, and that the non-existent law about this is somehow enforced by... random bigots opting to deputize themselves. What DOES happen for real though is bigots like this being arrested for barging into public restroom stalls with camcorders aimed at the crotches of women on toilets and trying to defend themselves by insisting they have some duty to check what their genitals look like. On which note...

That’s just disgusting. It’s also as close as I feel comfortable to posting all the graphic fantasies I see from these people about the barbaric genital mutilation they imagine trans women subject ourselves to which really has no basis at all in reality. Well maybe I can post this one.

I’m not going to go through and itemize all the baldfaced lies in that, because I really kinda hope I don’t have to, and also because the person who slapped this together was kind enough to break it up in such a way that I legitimately can say “every single line of this is a completely baseless lie.” Also the art in the corner is stolen from a child-friendly comic whose author is trans, so, that’s extra slimy. Also wow that “bone scans” bit is actually one I’ve never seen. Where the hell do they even get these ideas?

Also this one needs some setup. If you have time, this right here is a freaking journey, if not, I’ll try to summarize.

So a while ago, this one particular unhinged bigot decided the most productive way to spend all her time was to get in touch with a bulk sticker printing business and order thousands if not millions of these weird gross poorly framed slabs with a really crude drawing of a penis and bunch of gibberish she really wishes were the names of popular twitter hashtags that nobody else but her ever uses. And then after receiving these, just... wandering around the city she lives in all day every day plastering them on phone booths and power poles and the mirrors of bathrooms in like.. elementary schools and park benches, just everywhere. And then makes multiple passes a day apparently to make sure nobody has tried to remove any of them, as detailed in this amazing thread I’ll link again.

So the latest break in that particular saga is that same zealot going around plastering stickers like this around too, to make it seem like “both sides do it.”

It should be obvious that that’s a “blacks rule!” sort of fake between the baffling text and using the extra inclusive, particular emphasis on supporting people of color, general purpose LGBT+ flag, but also, like their fellows on 4chan, they plan this sort of “false flag” crap in broad daylight:

I should really properly credit the whistle-blowing on that particular oddity, and I should also note that aside from the breast milk sacks, this is all just stuff I saw TODAY catching up on my twitter feed, but my main point with all this is to illustrate that we really are dealing with Jack Chick/Westboro Baptist-level unhinged zealotry... but again, nobody’s out there pointing and laughing. And it turns out, when you don’t have people pointing and laughing at this sort of thing, you get people taking it seriously. So... when I went to quickly search for a news story to link with the bit about creeps barging in on women with cameras, the results I got were... this.

That... sure is a lot of stories about totally innocent people in a demographic I belong to being murdered by total strangers goaded into blind murderous hatred by the sort of people I’m pointing and laughing at! Ha ha! There’s a very real chance of that happening to me every time I step outside, for any reason! Tee hee! I live in a state of constant fear! Whoopsie!

And it’s not just stuff like that. The people posting these rambling tirades about “breast milk sack implants” and putting crude penis stickers everywhere, never being called out as the unhinged weirdos they are, either have the world turning a blind eye to all this crap, or have everything they do downplayed in the media to the point where outright sexual harassment, doxing, and slurs I don’t want to repeat get headlines like “so-and-so made comments that some fringe trans activists on the internet deem ‘possibly transphobic’” and that’s AT BEST. More often you get stuff like the one incident I managed to bring a lot of public attention to way back when, where some bigot just literally walked up to someone on the street, grabbed them, savagely beat the hell out of them until pulled apart, had friends film the whole thing, and bragged after the fact about it, and every story that appeared as a result claimed the assailant was the victim, because they were all written by her friends.

Face obscuring provided by me here, by the way.

And that isn’t a one-off incident. Because, see, most of these unhinged weirdos spewing out all this transphobic gibberish are not, as you would think, a bunch of barely educated Trump hat wearing members of some fringe religious congregation. They’re editors and producers in major British news outlets. This isn’t me shouting conspiracy nonsense either, this is well-documented. Like, The Guardian gets public internal protests over this crap. So does the BBC. Yes, other respected news sites cover this. Media watchdog groups do their best to reign this in with hearings and such, but, don’t actually have any power to enforce anything really. So when there’s “reporting” on this crap, it’s coming directly from the “breast milk sack implant” people. Oh and here’s some screenshots of the headlines of those stories you’re too lazy to click through and actually read:

And of course, sometimes when they want to really come across as respectful, they try to find “scientists” and “doctors” who back up their ravings but all they have to fall back on are disgraced quacks who spend most of their time on activism work to normalize pedophilia.

I’m not bringing that point about Cantor up to discredit his writings about trans people by the way. He doesn’t really HAVE any writings about trans people. He just pasted the names of a bunch of random studies from the 70s about whether playing with barbies makes you gay into his blog a few years back and this crowd was so desperate for validation they declared him an “expert in the field” and started passing out links to his.... pro-pedophila blog. Which is part of this whole pattern, but I’ve written about that before. Oh and the governments of multiple countries manage to treat all these people as “experts” and make policy decisions based on their ravings. That’s fun.

Anyway, aside from encouraging random people to, you know, just randomly murder anyone they see who looks like maybe a trans woman, every so often this weird little cult pulls in an actual celebrity who then has a public meltdown as they post all this gibberish to a wider audience. Currently this is going on with Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling (who’s actively promoting the pedophile guy up there on Twitter), and I think also William Shatner, but I haven’t really looked into it. The last big one though was Graham Linehan. Who you might remember from co-writing some sitcoms that were popular decades ago in Britain, or from being the weird cartoon villain who tried to kill the funding of a children’s charity, prompting this strange pledge drive marathon of Donkey Kong Country.

You might also know him as one of... I think honestly just two people who have ever managed to be such out of control stalking hate mongers that they were actually given a permanent no possible appeal ban from Twitter. Personally though I know him more as, you know, that one absolute creep who’s been obsessively stalking me for like 5 years and never shutting up about his weird personal obsession with me.

I WOULD link the recent freaking filmed interview he did where he spent forever rambling about me, but I’d have to actually watch it to confirm I had the right link, and also the only place I could quickly find a link to it would be on his twitter feed, which as stated, no longer exists. Oh and random side note there, despite being personally, by name, the person he was explicitly targeting all his hateful ramblings at, he wasn’t banned from that site for any of the disgusting stuff he said to me. He just slipped up and mentioned a cis woman with a professorship while shouting about this crap recently and that caused people to actually take action. I do so love being invisible.

Anyway, point is, prior to Rowling grabbing the baton from him as his social media presence went up in flames, this guy was name-dropping me a LOT. Presumably he still is, just in places fewer people see it. And when you have as big an audience as he did, and that audience is as full of hatemongers as his was, that has a pretty noticeable effect. I’ve been deluged with so much hateful garbage for so long it’s impossible for me to put any numbers on it. The closest I can do to quantify it is note that hate dump was big enough that I was also flooded with more weird messages intended as support from total strangers than I could deal with, totally losing access to social media feeds and my e-mail from the volume for a good bit, and THAT flood was big enough that I got this whole second wave of creepy stalkers who’d built up this whole weird fanon where this stalker here is like, someone I used to date or be business partners with and not just some creepy dude like twice my age stalking me over the internet, from a completely different hemisphere.

And I mean... in the broadest of strokes, I can kinda laugh all this off. Because... these people are completely ridiculous, out of touch with reality, and mostly live in other countries. But... all the threats and shouting are very real and very constant and like.. picture someone outside on the street shouting at your windows about how they’re going to break in and kill you. You really can’t ignore that. Even if they’re unarmed, and all they’re really capable of doing is shouting and pounding on your door, you can’t really just ignore that shouting and pounding and just watch a movie or play a game or write this article you promised would be done 3 months ago. You can certainly try, but a pretty big part of your brain is going to be occupied with thoughts about how maybe you should call someone to see if they’ll escort this violent person away, or maybe you should barricade your door in case all that pounding does something.

And I mean this isn’t a bad metaphor for how all the constant threats and stalking I’m dealing with thanks to celebrity bigots personally obsessed with me impacts my life, but it also does a pretty good job of describing how my night went pretty recently when I ACTUALLY DID HAVE SOMEONE POUNDING ON MY ACTUAL REAL PHYSICAL DOOR SHOUTING ABOUT STABBING ME TO DEATH, and no, there was no resolution to that beyond the sound of sirens causing that person to back off.

I also had an experience not too long ago where I was supposed to take a cab to a routine appointment, a car showed up with the cab company’s name on it, somewhat early, and proceeded to drive me... out to the middle of the freaking woods like an hour from where I live, and when my phone rang with my actual cab asking where I was the driver freaked out, had me get out of the car, and took off leaving me just... stuck in the middle of nowhere freezing to death and trying to find a landmark an actual cab could pick me up from. Still don’t know what the hell that whole thing was about and whether a cab driver just REALLY didn’t know what he was doing and panicked or what, but I do know that talking about it publicly in the vaguest of terms lead to a bunch of unhinged shouting from... apparently some unconnected ride share driver with a habit of dumping trans women between stops when they try to get medications or something, convinced I was calling him out for that.

So.... yeah. Things aren’t exactly going great in my neck of the woods. I’d really appreciate it if people would properly treat these unhinged violent weirdos like unhinged violent weirdos and not respectable members of society so they quit getting so bold and public with the violent stuff, and people who listen to them get properly shouted down for doing so.