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abtrusion · 1 month

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Theories of the holy shit what did I just see back there on the street?

Because transmisogyny makes them so impossible to ignore, for at least the last 70 years transfeminized people have served as key material of Anglo-American gender/queer/trans theories, as laundered through anthropology, sexology, and uncited personal witnessing. The anaemic denial of this fact through snappy and surface-level distinctions between ‘queer’ and ‘trans’ and between different transfeminized groups has made it functionally impossible for these theories to seriously account for transf* life, and this failure is highly productive, because it allows for the continued use of both ‘premodern’ ‘third gender’ and ‘postmodern’ transgenderism as lobotomized material for the theories of other people. The last century of gender theoretic development has revolved around slowly refining methods of extracting transfeminized peoples’ insight, forgetting and re-introducing them to their field over and over again to frame them as perpetual novelties, leading to a pernicious form of feminist amnesia that repeats over and over again.

1 . MARGARET MEAD (1949)

The work begins with Margaret Mead, the ‘most famous anthropologist of our century’ (Behar and Gordon 1996), who made her career studying indigenous groups in Samoa and New Guinea, then joined the larger anthropological effort to inform the US Government’s genocidal re-education campaigns against Indigenous American tribes. She later enjoyed a prodigious career as a public intellectual and shifted to more explicitly feminist writing which extensively influenced the movements of the 60s and 70s. Mead argued that essentially all sex-gender roles were culturally determined, and used the specter of the transfeminized homosexual-transvestite both to make that argument and to advocate for gender abolition.

This can be seen most clearly in Mead’s 1949 book Male and Female: a Study of the Sexes in a Changing World. Mead chronologically traces individual gender development through an ethnographic-sexological narrative, beginning with ‘first learnings’ that a child receives primarily through observation. Then the family comes in, and the transvestite comes with it, existing as the primary motive (alongside Freudian sexual attachment) which motivates gendered socialization:

Too great softness, too great passivity, in the male and he will not become a man. The American Plains Indians, valuing courage in battle above all other qualities, watched their little boys with desperate intensity, and drove a fair number of them to give up the struggle and assume women’s dress. (Mead 1949)

Mead argues that “fear that boys will be feminine in behavior may drive many boys into taking refuge in explicit femininity,” but makes a distinction between this identification and what she calls ‘full transvestitism,’ the culturally-specific recognition of that status. This differential leads her to conclude that the physical traits seen as markers of ‘gender inversion’ are culturally specific, and that what is understood as physical sex (then existing on a ‘spectrum’ model) is therefore partially socially determined.

For Mead, gender must be abolished precisely because of the fact that she could even make this argument. As she says,

Only a denial of life itself makes it possible to deny the interdependence of the sexes. Once that interdependence is recognized and traced in minute detail to the infant’s first experience of the contrast between the extra roughness of a shaven cheek and a deeper voice and his mother’s softer skin and higher voice, any programme which claims that the wholeness of one sex can be advanced without considering the other is automatically disallowed.

The desperate need to reproduce these distinctions, to make sex clear and visible and obvious, leads Mead to ultimately argue for a gender abolition that rests on complementary sex-roles. The main benefit of this approach for Mead is the complete eradication of sex-gender ‘confusion’ and its incarnation in transfeminized people, so associated precisely because of their intense usefulness as a tool for undermining sex-gender distinctions. So Mead sees the construction of physical and social gender by using transfeminized people as a lens, but because of her own disgust she can only fix gender by unseeing it again, by displacing gender to ‘real’ physical sex and protecting herself by breaking the tool. This, unsurprisingly, leaves her exactly where she started.

2. BETTY FRIEDAN (1963)

The feminist theorists that came after Mead directly confronted this reversion to ‘complementary sex’ logics, most notably in Betty Friedan’s foundational work The Feminine Mystique. Friedan discusses the ‘paradox’ of Mead’s influence, the strange combination of her exposure of ‘the infinite variety of sexual patterns and the enormous plasticity of human nature’ and her ‘glorification of women in the female role – as defined by their sexual biological function.’ In the middle, Friedan cites a page-long quote describing a point of ambivalent warning in Mead’s writing:

The difference between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature… Sometimes one quality has been assigned to one sex, sometimes to the other. Now it is boys who are thought of as infinitely vulnerable and in need of special cherishing care, now it is girls… Some people think of women as too weak to work out of doors, others regard women as the appropriate bearers of heavy burdens “because their heads are stronger than men’s” … Some religions, including our European traditional religions, have assigned women an inferior role in the religious hierarchy, others have built their whole symbolic relationship with the supernatural world upon male imitations of the biological functions of women. (emph added by me)

...Are we dealing with a must that we dare not flout because it is rooted so deep in our biological mammalian nature that to flout it means individual and social disease? Or with a must that, although not so deeply rooted, still is so very socially convenient and so well tried that it would be uneconomical to flout it…

...We must also ask: What are the potentialities of sex differences? … If little boys have to meet and assimilate the early shock of knowing that they can never create a baby with the sureness and incontrovertibility that is a woman’s birthright, how does this make them more creatively ambitious, as well as more dependent upon achievement?

Friedan attributes this ultimate focus on sexual difference to Mead’s Freudianism: she argues that Mead’s need to approach culture and personality through sexual difference, combined with her anthropological understanding that ‘there are no true-for-every-culture sexual differences except those involved in the act of procreation’ (Friedan and Quindlen 1963), combines to cause her to inflate the cultural importance of the reproductive role of women. Friedan intensely rebukes this reification of reproduction as another component of the ‘feminine mystique’ (very close to the modern ‘divine feminine’), advocating for programs which enable women to reject the mystique and housewife status and to seek education and employment, to combat the problem ‘which had no name’ but takes shape through spikes in female ‘sex-hunger’ and ‘overt manifestations’ of passive male homosexuality, both understood as ‘children acting out the sexual phantasies of their housewife-mothers.’ In a paradoxical return to Freudianism, Friedan characterizes husbands unwilling to let their wives work as being seduced ‘by the infantile phantasy of having an ever-present mother’ (the Freudian homosexuality-signifier), associating antifeminism with passive homosexuality with femininity which the aspiring feminist has escaped, learning to compete “not as a woman, but as a human being.”

3. THE MULTIPLICATION OF TRANSFEMINIZED SUBJECTS

As we can see, transfeminized subjects are frequently used as signs of system collapse, hypervisible enough to be easy examples and potent enough to rhetorically corrode existing sex-gender systems in preparation for the author’s own vision. Once a piece is published, these examples are usually then forgotten, assumed as scaffolding for the real theory; but the rhetorical strawmen of these transfeminized subjects still remain, trapped implicitly in the text, and they bleed into one another with every new addition to the corpus, every call to action invoking a new transfeminized archetype.

So far we have seen Mead’s anthropological-orientalist framing of ‘transvestitism’ among the anthropological Other and Friedan’s psychological framing of ‘passive homosexuality’ in the United States. The increasing visibility of adult ‘transsexuality,’ somewhat disjoint from the developmental sexology Gill-Peterson (2017) discusses because of its visibility in high-profile cases like Christine Jorgensen, was likewise framed for theory. Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) book Studies in Ethnomethodology, which described methods for observing ‘the objective reality of social facts as an ongoing accomplishment,’ used an intersex woman named Agnes as an avenue to expose how everyday social facts are constructed. Agnes was an ideal exemplar because her insistence on getting HRT and being seen as a woman was considered psychologically normal: “Such insistence was not accompanied by clinically interesting ego defects. These persons contrast in many interesting ways with transvestites, trans-sexualists, and homosexuals.” Of course, Garfinkel was later notified that Agnes did not have an intersex condition, and he then noted that ‘this news turned the article into a feature of the same circumstances it reported, i.e. into a situated report.’

Anyways, now it’s time for yet another transfeminized subject: the ‘transsexually constructed lesbian feminist.’

4. JANICE RAYMOND (1979)

As with her predecessors, Raymond sees analytical power in her particular transfeminized group, arguing that “transsexualism goes to the question of what gender is, how to challenge it, and what reinforces gender stereotypes in a role-defined society.” But she also has some concerns for ‘transsexual women,’ initially assumed heterosexual, none of which are particularly novel or interesting. Now that she’s writing in an environment dominated by Friedan’s mandate towards shedding femininity, feminist amnesia makes it novel to regurgitate Margaret Mead’s responses: that “male transsexualism may well be a graphic expression of the destruction that sex-role molding has wrought on men,” and that “men recognize the power that women have by virtue of female biology and the fact that this power, symbolized in giving birth, is not only procreative but multidimensionally creative” (Raymond 1979).

Her analysis of (new archetype) ‘transsexually-constructed lesbian feminism’ is much more interesting. While Raymond can understand heterosexual transsexual women as ‘reinforcing gender stereotyping’ by pulling primarily from medical archives already hegemonized by gatekeeping and passing requirements, the transsexual women in the lesbian-feminist movement achieved a certain degree of personal contact and visibility that undermined ‘hegemonizing’ logics. So Raymond uses three main arguments: an essentialist appeal to fundamental ‘maleness,’ a red-scare-esque appeal to transsexual lesbian feminists as ‘court eunuchs’ bent on monitoring and controlling feminist spaces, and finally, an argument that transsexual lesbian feminists are fundamentally epistemically corrosive to lesbian feminist spaces:

Whereas the lesbian-feminist crosses the boundary of her patriarchally imposed sex role, the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist is a boundary violator. This violation is also profoundly mythic, for as Norman O. Brown writes of Dionysus, he as the ‘‘mad god who breaks down boundaries.’’

Contrary to contemporary transmisogynistic discourse which frames trans lesbians as personal threats to women in lesbian-feminist spaces, this violation takes its form not in any particular act but in the act of passing, the deconstructive question this existence seemingly automatically places on lesbian-feminist spaces:

One of the most constraining questions that transsexuals, and, in particular, transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists, pose is the question of self-definition—who is a woman, who is a lesbian-feminist? But, of course, they pose the question on their terms, and we are faced with answering it.

Raymond notes with some frustration that this transsexual question has been discussed ‘out of proportion to their actual numbers,’ using up valuable feminist energy, and frames this as a symptom and crime of transsexual lesbianism itself. The trans question is transsexual women; like the theorists before her, she sees transfeminized people as a gaping hole in the gendered world, but now they’re inside her house, feeding “off woman’s true energy source, i.e., her woman-identified self,” and inherently stand to break “the boundaries of what constitutes femaleness,” to dissolve lesbian-feminism itself.

I want to stress two main points in all of this. First, Raymond understands studying transsexualism as a crucial tool for answering ‘the question of what gender is’ and ‘how to challenge it.’ Second, Raymond’s anxiety about transsexual lesbian-feminists moves away from specific actions and towards the ‘penetration’ inherent in their existence in these spaces at all, the understanding that transsexual women are inherently corrosive to lesbian-feminist movements. These two points are clearly linked. Raymond understands transsexuality as a form of epistemic gender acid, something that can be useful at arm’s length but is deadly up close. Of course, the transfeminized people she discusses were not necessarily invested in asking the Trans Question themselves; trans women attended lesbian-feminist events like Michfest before and after their trans exclusion policies, and regardless of ‘passing’ many people enjoyed a form of don’t ask don’t tell (Tagonist 1997). But within these spaces, the Trans* Question long predated the actual existence of transfeminized people – so once they arrived, the Question and person were fundamentally linked. Trans theorists have negotiated this association extensively, but that’s not the topic of this essay, so I’ll leave you with some sources (Stryker 1994; Stone 1992) and move to Butler.

5. JUDITH BUTLER (1990)

This work has been done already by Vivian Namaste (2020), who argues that “contemporary discussions of Anglo-American feminist theory, exemplified in Butler’s work, begin with the Transgender Question as a way to narrow our focus to the constitution, reproduction, and resignification of gender.” This singular focus on the ‘Transgender Question’ has made it functionally impossible for Anglo-American feminist theory to consider the outsized role of work, particularly sex work, in motivating the discrimination and violence against transfeminized people of color: “framing violence against transsexual prostitutes as ‘gender violence’ is a radical recuperation of these events and their causal nature-a violence at the level of epistemology itself.”

Namaste attributes this focus on featureless ‘gender violence’ to a crippling lack of empiricism, a lack of researcher-subject equity, and an exclusion of subject knowledges. She provides an effective power-based solution to this epistemic violence – that feminist theorists should talk with the subjects of their theory and give them some measure of power in the transaction – a sort of endpoint analysis which means she doesn’t need to consider too much of the internals of the system she’s challenging. That’s a good idea for her work, but with the benefit of history we can move differently. The next section synthesizes Butler, Friedan, Mead, and Raymond together to provide a functionalist analysis of the feminist theoretic use of transfeminized people. What are the benefits of using transfeminized people as an epistemic tool in feminist theory? What are the dangers of using this epistemic tool, and how does feminist theory manage those dangers?

6. PATTERNS OF EXTRACTION AND DEFENSE

Looking past Butler and further into the past reveals that transfeminized people have been crucial not just to the feminist theory of the past 20 years, but have served as exemplars as far back as the 1940s. The ‘Trans* Question,’ which frames transfeminized people as the most visible signifier and most horrifying symptom of social gender, has been cyclically used in a form of feminist cultural amnesia:

A transfeminized group serves as a hypervisible example to 'deconstruct' social gender

Transfeminized deconstruction bloats beyond itself, undermining 'sex traits' or 'femaleness' or some other foundational category of feminist analysis.

Reconstruction of gender as 'biological sex,' alliance between feminist theorists and men of all stripes by arguing that post-gender eradication of transfeminized people will (a) allow men to be feminine without becoming women or (b) destroy femininity entirely.

New-generation feminist theorists realize their predecessors have reinvented social gender. Return to (1).

As Margaret Mead’s work shows, the use of transfeminized groups to deconstruct both physical and social gender has been observed regardless of transmedicalization. This helical pattern has a few general properties:

Each cycle introduces a distinct transfeminized group, positioning it against prior groups as uniquely suitable for analysis, but simultaneously blurs the new group into the existing melange.

This "Trans* Queston" is almost entirely devoid of group-specific context and rooted in transmisogyny, which positions them as horrifying and visible symptoms of social gender.

Each "Trans* Question" initially exposes social gender, but constantly threatens to dissolve other categories or even the theorist's own writing as socially constructed, against the theorist's will.

Each new cycle demonstrates near-complete historical amnesia as to the relevance of transfeminized people in the prior theoretical move.

So the “Trans* Question” allows for the basic feminist move, asserting that gender is socially constructed, but if improperly controlled it stands to dissolve virtually any definition feminist theorists try to build. To be clear, I do not believe in the total deconstruction of categories – you need definitions, even ones you acknowledge as imprecise, to say anything at all. But transfeminized people probably have pretty solid ideas about gender, having to, you know, live with it. The alienated ‘Trans Question*’ has none of this insight, appearing instead as a gaping epistemic hole in the world, and so feminist theorists are forced to come up with complicated quarantining measures to keep the Question from spilling over.

What jeopardizes feminist theory’s use of the Question? One answer (among many) comes by looking at Mead, who concluded that physical characteristics seen as ‘sex traits’ were socially constructed by looking at the culture-specific construction of what she called ‘full transvestitism.’ In this case, the Question undermined sex when the social position of transfeminized subjects were seen as simultaneously normative and anti-normative, existing in some normative ‘social’ role while being understood as distinct from non-transfeminized subjects via another ‘natural’ axis. The fact that these splits were made differently across different transfeminized groups undermined the distinction between social and ‘natural/biological’ aspects of gender, and because the alienated Question provides no means of making anything solid out of any of this, Mead retreated to the womb.

So understanding that the Question allows for the deconstruction of gender, and that it overgrows when multiple (studied as) semi-normative transfeminized groups are cross-compared with one another, we can consider aspects of contemporary feministqueertrans theory that enforce the epistemic isolation and normativization/antinormativization of transfeminized groups. The knots this ties in feminist theories seem relevant both to the ‘why does trans theory exist’ question posed by Chu & Drager (2019) and to the challenges and limitations of applying queer/trans theory to groups outside the anglosphere (Chiang 2021, Savci 2021). I’ll discuss that more in another essay.

SOURCES

Behar, Ruth, and Deborah A. Gordon. 1996. Women Writing Culture. First Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chiang, Howard. 2021. Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific. Columbia University Press.

Chu, Andrea Long, and Emmett Harsin Drager. 2019. “After Trans Studies.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6 (1): 103–16. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7253524.

Friedan, Betty, and Anna Quindlen. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. Reprint edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. 1st edition. Cambridge Oxford Malden,MA: Polity.

Gill-Peterson, Jules. 2017. “Implanting Plasticity into Sex and Trans/Gender.” Angelaki 22 (2): 47–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2017.1322818.

Mead, Margaret. 1949. Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World. First Edition. William Morrow.

Namaste, Viviane. 2020. “Undoing Theory: The ‘Transgender Question’ and the Epistemic Violence of Anglo-American Feminist Theory.” In Feminist Theory Reader, edited by Carole McCann, Seung-kyung Kim, and Emek Ergun, 5th edition. New York, NY London: Routledge.

Raymond, Janice G. 1979. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. New York: Teachers College Press.

Savci, Evren. 2021. Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics Under Neoliberal Islam. Durham (N.C.): Duke University Press Books.

Stone, Sandy. 1992. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 10 (2 (29)): 150–76. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10-2_29-150.

Stryker, Susan. 1994. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (3): 237–54. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1-3-237.

Tagonist, Anne. 1997. “Sister Subverter Diary August ’97.” Unapologetic: The Journal of Irresponsible Gender.

#transmisogyny #trans #transgender #my writing

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semidecentpoet · 2 months

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What gets me ab western mainstream news coverage of the genocide in Palestine—besides the obvious lack of morality—is that it’s, frankly, shit journalism.

(For context, I’m a journalism major with a focus in print reporting. This is literally what I’m going to school for.)

(Forgive me if this is slightly disorganized. Harder to write when I’m pissed.)

My instructors tell me ab the importance of active voice over passive voice all. The. Time. There’s a difference, for example, between “More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed” and “Israel has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians.”

More recently, I’ve had instructors tell me to be more skeptical of official sources (e.g. police), fact-check their claims and get alternative sources whenever possible.

But, from what I’ve seen, a lot of outlets seem to just take Israel’s word as fact without searching for further evidence. For example, when Israel made that claim—with no real evidence—ab the 40 beheaded babies and it was everywhere. And then they said they can’t confirm shit, and now these outlets have to backpedal.

And of course, on top of the blatant misuse of language (beyond just active vs passive voice) and the false/unsupported reporting, there’s the lack of reporting.

I don’t see western mainstream outlets quoting the assholes who call Palestinians “human animals.”

I don’t see them pointing out the sickening abundance of social media posts of Israelis celebrating the genocide, of IDF posing in front of the rubble of what once was Gaza or with the undergarments of the Palestinian women and girls they raped.

I don’t see them setting their headlines ablaze with the countless historic holy sites Israel has destroyed, mosques and churches alike that were some of the oldest in the world. (But when Notre Dame was on fire—)

I don’t even see the context of the more than 75 years of Israel’s bullshit leading up to now.

Where is the coverage of the entire families Israel have wiped out? Where is the coverage of how Israel treats its hostages? Where is the coverage of the Palestinian people’s injuries, physical and mental, and the reason for the lack of proper medical aid?

Countless children in Gaza have to undergo amputations in unsanitary environments without anesthesia. Where’s the coverage?

Who is asking Biden the important questions? Like, if you’re trying so hard for a ceasefire, why has the United States vetoed United Nations resolutions for an immediate ceasefire three times since Oct. 7? Why a temporary ceasefire instead of a permanent one?

How ab Israel’s attack on Rafah during the Super Bowl?? Rafah the designated safe zone?? While airing a $7 million ad?? During what is arguably the most famous and most-watched sports event in the U.S., which has given billions of dollars in support of Israel’s genocide?? How are these outlets not blowing up????? This is a U.S.-funded slaughter during a national event???? Is this not newsworthy enough for you??????????????

Maybe they include some of these things in their articles. But when and if they do, is it a full-fledged story or just a brief?

Is it toward the top of the page or buried lower? (Journalists typically use the inverted pyramid style, which means the most important information in a story is at the top.)

I understand that, as journalists, we have to be objective. But this is not objective reporting. It is clearly biased in favor of Israel. If it were any other country, any other people under siege, this would all look a lot different.

On the topic of objectivity, I’ve heard a few arguments along the lines of, “We can’t pick a side.” But is there truly more than one side to this crisis?

One instructor of mine has said that “both sides” is a false dichotomy, meaning there are rarely ever exactly two sides to any given issue. Sometimes that means there are more than two sides, and sometimes that means there is really only one.

Coincidently, an example he gave of only one side was the Holocaust in Nazi Germany. Even though there are assholes who say otherwise, it was real. It happened. It was wrong. There’s no other way to look at it.

Ik that journalists bending objectivity and imposing morality in reporting is a relatively recent and controversial debate within the media industry.

But.

If we do some actual goddamn reporting—take the numbers and the quotes and the experiences caught on video and add them all together—we start to paint a pretty clear picture of who is the victim here. And who is responsible for the atrocities.

Just bc our government supports Israel does not mean Israel perspective is on equal footing with, much less more important than, Palestine’s.

When Palestine’s death toll is roughly 30 times that of Israel’s, there’s only one side.

This is some pretty shit journalism.

I’d look forward to hearing from other journalists/student journalists what they think ab coverage of the genocide.

Personally, I’m a little heartbroken that some of these outlets I’ve looked up to and dreamed ab being a part of someday have been so lacking in their coverage—to say the least. Especially since journalism is so important and is supposed to be a major means of holding people in power accountable for their actions.

Life’s bitter irony, I suppose.

Free Palestine.

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gothhabiba · 4 months

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What's going on in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem? a timeline

Background

700s-1920s: Armenian Christians immigrate to Palestine, at first due to the holy sites there and later (after 1915) fleeing the Armenian genocide. Most of them end up living in a section of Jerusalem known as the Armenian Quarter. An Armenian church / Patriarchate is established that has authority over Armenian Apostolic Christians everywhere.

1923-1947: Britain (who had been given the "mandate," aka direct governmental control, of Palestine by other European colonial powers), empowers Patriarchates in Jerusalem (church leadership) to do things like select their own leaders and sell land without oversight from their communities. This gives Britain more authority and prevents regular Palestinian people from knowing what's going on when it comes to church business including secret real estate deals.

2005-2019: Land in Jerusalem belonging to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate is sliced up, sold, and developed despite attempts to fight it in Israeli courts.

July 2021: The Armenian Patriarchate makes a deal leasing 2.7 acres of land to real estate / development company Xana Gardens (based in Dubai and owned by Israeli businessman Danny Rothman) for between 49 and 98 years. The deal is made without proper oversight and approval, including from within the Patriarchate.

The land in question includes the historical Cows' Garden (Hadiqa al-Baqar / حديقة البقر), now a parking lot; part of a church school; a garden; and five family houses. It makes up about 1/4 of the total land in the Armenian Quarter. No one knows that more than just Cows' Garden is affected.

Xana Gardens wants to build a luxury hotel on some of this land, including Cow's Garden.

Events in 2023

May: Details of the nature of the real estate deal come out. The government of Jordan (I think? these news reports are written in the passive voice) and Armenian institutions try to contact the Patriarchate to express concern about the handling of historically significant sites. The Patriarch does not respond.

11 May: Jordan and Palestine suspend their recognition of Patriarch Nourhan Manougian.

26 October: The Patriarchate announces that it has contacted Xana Gardens to cancel the deal. Xana Gardens does not respond.

Later on 26 October (around 3pm): Israeli bulldozers arrive at Cows' Garden and start tearing up pavement and demolishing a wall. Armenians rush to stand in front of bulldozers and prevent further destruction.

5 November: Rothman and other representatives of Xana Gardens arrive with 15 settlers and tell local Armenians that the land is theirs and they need to leave. Some of the settlers have guns and leashed dogs. About 200 Armenian Palestinians arrive and force the settlers to stand down.

12 and 13 November: Xana Gardens sends bulldozers to Cows' Garden. They do not have necessary permits. Armenians set up constantly rotating vigils at the Gardens and make barricades with pieces of metal and their cars.

15 November, 4:30pm: Israeli settlers drive a convoy of cars into the Garden. Armenians gather around the barricades. The police back the settlers and arrest three Armenians, including one child.

28th December: 30+ settlers attack a group of Armenian bishops, priests, deacons, and seminary students (including Bishop Koryoun Baghdasaryan, the director of the Patriarchate's real estate department) with sticks and nerve agents / tear gas, injuring several.

28th December, later: The Patriarchate releases a statement attributing the attack to Xana Gardens. The development company does not want the Patriarchate to continue trying to reverse the deal through the court system.

#Palestine #Jerusalem

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readingsquotes · 2 months

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"In today’s near-constant news cycle on Gaza, Palestinians seem to die at the hands of an invisible executioner. Palestinians are shot dead. Palestinians starve. Palestinian children are found dead. But where is there accountability? Palestinians die, they aren’t killed, as if their death is a fault of their own.

The obfuscation of responsibility is facilitated by a structure often overlooked since grade school: grammar. At this moment, grammar has the indelible power to become a tool of the oppressor, with the passive voice the most relied-upon weapon of all.

....

Over the years, I’ve combed through headlines searching for the active voice in a sea of passivity. I need those who commit actions, those who hold agency, to be named. I need Israel and its occupational forces to be named.

The passive voice often focused on the recipient of the event, not the doer. In the news today, I see only the passive voice: “A group of Palestinian men waving a white flag are shot at,” and I can’t help but hear the voices of my past English teachers ask, “But who ‘shot’ these men?” Accountability is not just vague; it’s altogether missing.

....

So let me amend the above statements, as my former English teachers would have requested, and put them into the active voice: Israel bombs Palestinian schools that house sacred archives. Israel bombs hospitals with necessary aid. Israel bombs community centers and historic holy spaces that have stood for centuries. Israel depletes Palestinian resources. Israel bombs Rafah, housing over 1 million displaced Palestinians, after claiming it a safe zone. Israel is starving Gaza.

#palestine #free palestine #isreal #gaza #genocide #apartheid #colonization #passive voice of genocide

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odinsblog · 2 months

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Find someone who looks at you the way mainstream media looks at the passive voice when reporting on Israel’s war crimes

#politics #palestine #israel #passive voice #media bias #journalism fail #war crimes #gaza #rafah #genocide #ethnic cleansing

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decolonize-the-left · 1 year

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Y'all I can't explain to you the pit I have in my stomach when I think about rising fascism, illness, inflation, and social unrest going into the 2024 elections. Especially when mixed with the widespread nihilism, burnout, and purity culture we're seeing

I am stressed

And I'm so fucking sick and tired of screaming in my corner of the internet for ANYONE to listen that fascism is here. That we NEED to keep fighting and yeah it's exhausting and it sucks but it wouldn't so suck much IF ENOUGH PEOPLE would just fucking listen and help spread the word. I could give my voice a break.

Like there no way EVERYONE is just not seeing/hearing. We're being intentionally and systematically ignored.

And the fact that I'm not the only one screaming and still people just choose to scroll or buy another "silly little treat" to help them cope instead of thinking for two seconds that they wouldn't HAVE to cope in Hell Timeline if they just supported the people demanding rights that would benefit EVERYONE

Like respectfully, you are so valid for hating it here and wanting to escape into your oat milk frappuccinos with extra whip, trust me so do I, but if things get worse people will die en fucking masse, do you understand?

Because we chose a Starbucks drink instead. Do you get it?

We HAVE to do something.

We can't just do nothing cuz that's easier.

And I know so, so many of us do what we can to make the changes we can. This post isn't about us.

It's about how we're going to fall into fascism because of people who think passively letting fascism happen and watching their neighbors be dragged away is a more emotionally acceptable consequence than actively making themselves uncomfortable in the name of human rights.

Hence the passport.

We've been screaming about this for decades trying to warn y'all and now fascism is undeniably here again and STILL most people won't give us the time of day. W h y?

My whole family are queer/neurodivergent natives of color.

I shouldnt feel like I have to run from where my people came from. Where my ancestors and living family still fight to protect.

But I'm very, very scared that if I don't our lives will be on the line. And with one genocide already in our history our survival is crucial to me.

How long am I supposed to wait for allies to help when I can see the mob marching towards me with pitchforks?

How close do I let them get until I'm allowed to admit no allies are showing up?

The awful answer to what most of you would do if fascism returned and you were forced to accept it or aid your fellow humans....

You'd accept it.

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what-even-is-thiss · 1 month

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So you put a tag under a reblog today saying you're a pacifist, and that a lot of people think it's an unnuanced position and it isn't. And I've been thinking about how pacifism fleshes out to a nuanced picture, but never had a chance to ask someone who actually describes as one.

So I now want to ask you, if I may, what exactly is the set of beliefs that form pacifism to you?

Because on one hand, "war is bad" and "we shouldn't do war if we can help it" are pretty mainstream takes, so I'd imagine pacifism would be more extreme than that. On the other hand, "don't fight or support wars ever, anywhere, ever, for any reason" is a pretty un-nuanced position in a world where, say, Russia exists.

So if pacifism is neither of those things, what is it exactly then

It's complicated, obviously. What pacifism means as a political position and a personal philosophy varies from person to person. Some people take it to the extreme and go vegan and live in the woods about it. Sometimes it's religiously motivated, sometimes it's not.

For me, pacifism in my personal life means avoiding violence unless absolutely necessary. No violence except for self defense or in the necessary defense of others, no joining the military or helping the military, and discouraging others from partaking in violence or violent institutions when possible.

At the same time though, violence is complicated. Practically, politically, I and likely every other pacifist on plant earth knows that stopping All War Right Now is an unattainable goal. And sometimes violence on a large scale can become a form of self defense. When people suffering from an attempted genocide retaliate with violence, especially if that's their only possible course of action, that's self defense.

What you want to aim for is the reduction of violence and death wherever possible. My ideal is that problems shouldn't be solved by violence. What policies can you support that reduces it? Can you protest your country being involved in war? Can you spread information discouraging people from joining the military?

Being pacifist doesn't mean being non-active or even passive. It means striving towards an ideal. A person in an elected position who holds to pacifist ideals will likely vote against expanding the military, officially declaring war, or expanding things like funding for police or military equipment no matter what and actively speak out against these things. Will this stop war from happening? No, not if only one person does it, but they are a voice in power against violence.

The goal, at least from my perspective, isn't to stop all violence right now. That's not possible. The goal is to eventually one day remove violence as a political tool and discourage it as a personal tool. Living that ideal out actively and spreading it around as much as you can is the most that one person can do most times. Do I think this will be achieved in my lifetime? No. I'm not naive, but that won't stop me from trying. That won't stop me from believing that the military as an institution has no place in a modern world and I will not let go of the belief that we should work towards a world where we don't need one.

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cosettepontmercys · 14 days

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I truly can’t pinpoint when/what exactly changed about Taylor’s fans/fandom but the last few years (especially the midnights release) has really soured things for me and it’s honestly quite disappointing as someone who genuinely enjoys her music and thinks she’s a great artists. how did we get to the point of not even being able to voice an opinion about taylor without being crucified online. or if heaven forbid you dislike a song/album or enjoy the work of one of her exes (john mayer, the 1975, calvin harris, etc)

i’ve always been very fascinated/intrigued by the relationship between celebrities and their fans. and i think it’s really interesting to look back and think about how taylor built her fanbase by making herself as palatable/relatable/approachable as possible. like secret sessions, t party/loft 89/rep room, swiftmas, lover diaries, etc — all of which allow for fan interaction — but also relies on people getting noticed which then in turn encourages people to be as vocal? extra? whatever it is. which then feeds into the "who is a bigger / better fan" competition. i'm speaking from personal experience here, as someone who has liked her since debut — but i think a lot of this is also rooted in how much of the world hated taylor swift prior to ... i want to say folklore, really — like it was deeply uncool to like taylor swift, to be a swiftie, etc. and because a lot of that early criticism was rooted so much in misogyny, i think fans felt the need to (over the years) defend her — and i was one of those! i still am, when i feel like people are criticizing her unfairly. but i think that lends into the "taylor swift has never done anything wrong, and she's perfect and if you disagree then you're against us and you're a fake fan" mentality.

and then i think there's an element of ... not necessarily a superiority complex, but a something among fans who have met taylor. it's a genius marketing move, intentions aside. taylor's music is very personal — and taylor's marketing, and persona is very personal, in a way that other artists prior to taylor weren't, i think. relatability sells. you can see it in the way that people talk about her, and her music. which is very different from the way people talk about other artists — and obviously there isn't anyone else out there with the amount of fame/popularity as her, but you don't see the same amount of fanfiction-writing personal-life-speculating-projection onto other artists' lyrics as you do with taylor. and i think that when someone is that vulnerable with their thoughts, it makes it easy for people to think that they know them personally.

and i think that — as much as i love taylor — it's important to talk about her white woman feminism mentality. and i think that also seeps into how her fanbase interacts with her. the ginny & georgia "joke" is what comes to mind the quickest, but there are countless instances of taylor's white woman feminism — and her benefiting from it. and obviously it was in her right to call out a misogynistic comment, especially one directed at her, but not saying anything when the actress got so much hate for a line she didn't write ... made me feel a bit 🥴. it's interesting to see who taylor will choose to align herself with, i guess is all i'm saying.

i've really taken a step back from taylor — not just because the fandom is exhausting ( the amount of things i've seen about her, joe, travis, etc. is ... something! it's all projection! we do not know anything about these people other than what they choose to show us! ) but also because of her saying that she wanted to be on the right side of history and then over and over again choosing to be increasingly passive and silent. she will call herself an ally but won’t even talk about queer rights; she won’t talk about the literal genocide that’s going on. gun control, abortion rights, anything at all. it's just "go vote" but even that is incredibly passive. but she will take time to remind us to buy new variants, and to stream her music, and that her ex sucks.

i think there was a huge shift that started with folklore/evermore, just given that there weren't a lot of albums being put out during that time, the overwhelming public reception to it — a lot of people who previously didn't care for (or disliked) taylor started to like her, to give her a second chance, etc. then we get into the rerecordings era/midnights/etc., which started off with fearless and nostalgia and then became "how quickly can i put out the next thing". and bailey @placeinthisworld posted this earlier, which i fully agree with. it's about the next award, the next milestone. it's just all quantity. it's overexposure.

and then we have the joe alwyn breakup and the public response to that was also ... interesting. like i saw people crying over it, or saying that love is a lie, removing things from their playlists, acting like they were the ones who had been broken up with. which is just ... odd, given that we aren't the ones in the relationship. and now there are all these comments about being a "joe defender". and then with taylor dating travis, it feels almost like some weird american pipe dream unfulfilled fantasy for so many people — the singer and the american football player. and obviously, i want her to be happy! i don't care who she dates! but i do think the public reception about her and travis has been ... incredibly odd, and i think that the way people talk about her and travis is just ... very ... off-putting and is very rooted in some weird ... stuff. "she finally gets to be small :(((((" is such a weird thing to say. it feels like there's even more projection and self-insert-y stuff with her dating travis, which is a level i did not think was possible from her fans (and more so, the general public).

i have not felt this ... detached and impassive about a taylor release, ever, and it just makes me incredibly sad because i love her music, and am excited about the work, just not excited about the public reception, the public autopsy of her and joe's relationship, or the noise, and i know that internet spaces (and spaces in general) are what we curate, but it's also difficult when she is everywhere.

#so sorry this took so long to reply to! i was out of town!#post: answered #ts critical

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sneakyboymerlin · 10 months

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*Gaius voice* Violence is bad, that’s why you shouldn’t kill Uther or even passively let him die! You should kill a bunch of people to protect Uther, though, that’s different, their lives don’t mean anything if they’re not kings. Now, Uther is going to perform horrible acts of violence such as drowning children as long as he lives but you have to understand, his wife died :( it was his fault but it still happened :( and he needed someone to blame! Hence the genocide. Just remember that Uther is justified because magic corrupts even though I’m harboring a sorcerer who is not corrupted by it. Uther thinks someone is stealing his boots but I actually keep swallowing them by accident during my lick breaks. Love the taste

#gaius critical #show critical #merlin meta #bbc merlin #tw genocide #tw child death #tw drowning

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suratan-zir · 1 year

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I've never been this close to leaving tumblr forever than I am now. Y'all are so humanistic, so righteous and merciful, when it's not your country that is being bombed into the stone age, not your people tortured, executed, shot and thrown into a mass grave with their hands tied simply for being citizens of a certain country, speaking a certain language. Not your babies being torn apart by missiles, buried under rubble. Not your relatives held in one of the many torture dungeons, being electrocuted through wires attached to their genitals. Not your houses leveled down, burned with everything inside, every little thing you loved or cared for.

Hell, we can even tone it down a notch. It's not you who is being left without electricity and water, without heating in winter, because it's not you who russia is trying to beat/freeze into submission. It's not you going to bed to the sound of an air raid siren and wondering if you'll wake up tomorrow. It's not you receiving insults, slurs and threats from russians. No, they probably don't have any problem with you, but even if they do, luckily for you, you don't speak russian. Because if you did, you could go to literally any place they hang out, any voice or text chat, any social media and ask them yourself. If only you'd spoke Russian, you could ask them what they think about the genocide carried out by their country, their people. And then you wouldn't have any more questions. Then you wouldn't dare to say it's "racist" to call russians what they are - murderers, thieves and their accomplices.

I never said that all russians support this war, this genocide. And I will never say it, it's just statistically impossible. But many of them do, and another large portion simply doesn't care, which in my opinion is even worse. I have less disgust and hatred for russians who say: "go-go pootin, all khokhols must die", then to those who mumble: "I'm not into politics". Because you can't afford to stay neutral and passive when your country is trying to obliterate an entire nation.

You know, those missiles that kill our people and destroy our infrastructure, they are launched from "peaceful" russian cities. Warplanes that fly to kill us fly - they fly over the heads of the "innocent" russians, who are filming it on their phones and cheering on. The only times they would be sad or pissed about it is when those planes suddenly crush on their homes. Or when something flies into their city in exchange for those missiles that flew out of there. This is when they get mad and demand to kill us more effectively.

Lately we are seeing many protests from the mothers and wives of those "poor" russian men who have been drafted into army. Do you know what they are protesting against? Of course you don't, because you don't speak russian, you don't care enough to find out. No, they aren't protesting against the war, genocide, bombings of cities of a neighboring country. They don't demand for the war to end. They demand that their sons and husbands not be sent to the very front line, they demand that they be placed on the 2-3 line of defense, where it is safe. Or they demand better equipment for their men, again, to kill the citizens of a neighboring country more effectively. Because they are not against the genocide, they just don't want their men to hurt during it. Those of us who understand russian language don't need to look at any polls and statistics. We can just ask them ourselves, and we hear their responds very clearly. Even from our own relatives who live in russia or from our former friends. And I wouldn't wish this horrible realization on anyone. Now there are more and more russians who don't support this war. Because they are losing it. They would have absolutely no problem with it if they could "take Kyiv in two days" as was planned. But now they have regrets.

I'm not asking you to blame and ostracize all russians. That's not the point I'm making here. But maybe - just maybe - you can't forgive people for things they didn't do to you? Maybe you can't be forgiving on behalf of others? If you live somewhere in the US, the russians can never harm you, your city will not be bombed, your relatives won't be kidnapped and tortured. Of course you don't hate them, of course you don't condemn them - it's not because you are morally superior - it's because you literally don't have to suffer from their aggression, either physical nor verbal. Your life isn't constantly endangered because of this particular country and people. Of course you can forgive and defend them all you want, and pat yourself on the head afterwards. Such a nice kind human being you are, not at all insensitive.

It's not like there are people who lost their homes, their loved ones. People living under constant shelling, without power and heat, people who survive day after day against all odds. But those people aren't as merciful as you. Only you are the beacon of humanism in this unfair world, good for you.

#ukraine

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