#tpoc positivity

[genderqueerdykes]

if you are a person of color and are struggling to understand or express your own gender because you do not and/or cannot conform to white beauty & gender standards you're not alone and you do not have to warp yourself to suit someone else's narrative- every culture on this planet has their own relationship with biological sex & gender and you do not have to mold yourself to suit gender roles that literally just don't exist in your cultures, or don't make sense to you

you do not have to try to change your face, hair or body to match standards that don't apply to you. you are allowed to approach gender in your own way, in whatever ways make sense to you. it's your life, your gender, your culture, your expression. you don't have to screw yourself over like that. good luck in finding the real you, you'll find them

[shermangiftbasket]

Hi I made a playlist of cool tracks by a variety of diff trans artists! Give it a look!

[my-nonbinary-crushes]

enbies with brown eyes i adore you

[bigbear-stud]

I’m the alpha, the omega, everything in between⚔️

[marstomarsh]

[greeneyesnake]

SLIDING DOWN THE WALL 📸📸📸

[trans-uni-students]

I’m looking for trans people who attend a UK university to take part in my research into the feelings of belonging and safety of transgender university students! Please consider taking this brief anonymous questionnaire (5-10 minutes) to discuss what would improve your university experience as a trans person!

[molecularhomosexual]

the backlash about shelby’s post is ridiculous (it’s transmisogyny, so i guess it is more common happenstance than it is ridiculous)—but there’s such stupidity in the backlash about thinking of gender as social technology as a white concept, and a conservative concept.

put aside the aggressive bad faith in not at all talking to the person you’re engaging with, to be so quick to enter into a relation of defending yourself as a threat that you make no eye contact with the person making the post, to hardly acknowledge their capacity for thought. you’re telling me that trans poc cannot afford to think of gender as social technology because it’s white? lo and behold, what should have saved me from my oppressed status as a woman of color is to think of gender as inherent!

thinking of gender as a social technology would also help us talk about the field of power for gender altogether (not sure how far shelby wanted to go with this thought). there are social-technical machines in place that help enforce what gender ought to be for the specific bodies, and they enforce unequally across lines of race, class, ability.

to say that being homosexual or transgender is a matter of a social technology can pinpoint the ways that these two are always in a process of cooptation and “rehabilitation” by dominant forces (think of the assimilative pressure to gender/sexual norms at all times, or the assimilative pressure to keep “gross, kinky bdsm shit” in the bedroom, private, unable to affect the world)—and on the flipside, it lets us talk about these terms as a way of indicating practices with other bodies, discourses that we utter towards each other, a whole assemblage of bodies and desires through which traverses forces of dominant power and forces of resistant power—maybe the dichotomy i would use just as a matter of taste would be technologies and counter-technologies, though i don’t think this terminology dichotomy is essential to the point.

along the lines of being able to critique dominant forces of gender and sexuality by thinking of them as social technologies, it would also give us a language for talking about something like maria lugones’ critique and genealogy of the modern/colonial gender system: how gender is marked on bodies during colonial domination, how norms of gender are unevenly applied across the settler/colonized divide (e.g. white women are positioned as pure and innocent, but black women are positioned as aggressive, even “masculine”, deviant, suspect).

there is no way of talking about this if we think of gender and sexuality (and race, for that matter) as qualia, difficult-to-describe subjective experience that has no clear correlate to social practices. there *is* a way to talk about this if we acknowledge settler colonialism as the creation of whiteness and racialization (thank you fred moten, and every interlocutor you reference in every essay of yours, and forgive me for rushing this point too quickly)—whiteness as racialization is yet another oppressive technology, which marks the flesh of other bodies as racialized. there is a way of talking about this if we notice that settler-colonialism put forward specific organizations of gender for the colonized, that didn’t always match the gender matrices of the colonizer, or at the very least of those who are posited in the colonizing process as “civilized”.

so please, i would love to hear more about how a concept that can help us think through the whiteness of settler-coloniality is actually a white, western concept that doesn’t serve tpoc and woc. and please, please keep in mind, imaginary counter-argumentator, that i am one of the trans women of color you profess to care for and defend in your instinctive reaction against these concepts, so i would appreciate you extending that care and defense to me! uwu

[feralrat666]

all labor is coerced under capitalism.

so why is it that only sex workers are assaulted by the very act of performing labor? why does a few dollars make an 8 hour shift passable, but not a quick fuck? why is it that only whores, who are mostly women and tpoc, get told that liking their shitty jobs makes them a perpetual victim who must let themselves be saved by white feminists and their discussions of political theory, of the swedish model? why is it only sex workers who are told that the safest thing for them is to have the cops lurking outside their jobs all night? why is it only sex workers who are told that our customers, our means of survival, should all be imprisoned, where it can be ensured they can’t put cash into our hands? EVERY choice that a woman of color or tpoc makes to survive under a white patriarchy is coerced. so what is the radical feminist obsession with stripping these choices from those who would make them? why spend so much time discussing how being a whore is the worst thing that could ever happen to a person, and that no one should be put in that position, when it’s working for a living that’s is the issue in the first place?

well, because sex workers are an easy target. easy to speak over, easy to speak down to. lawmakers and pimps and SWERFs have a lot in common, in that they view whores as an acceptable target, a fitting stand in for those they really have contempt for— poor women, women of color, trans women, women who make choices that they deem “unacceptable”. and especially, women and MaGes who would make those unsavory choices and then have the gall to participate in discourse rather than be ashamed and accept their place as statistics to be referenced. As objects. why is it that when a whore says, “actually, I’m a person, and I need this job to survive, what’s going to happen when it goes away?”, the only thing that can be offered is that we’re victims and we’ve been brainwashed and a furious rush to deny that they could’ve made an informed decision to do sex work over another form of labor?

if your ideas cannot withstand the challenge of “what about the choice I made?” they are not good ideas. if you’re going to tell a person that because their lived experience does not fit within your framework that they are depoliticizing the issue, derailing the discussion, then your political framework cannot be applied to people. especially when the discussion in question is about those people, and their lives, and the choices they made or didn’t have the opportunity to make.

saying that all sex work is rape is the same thing as saying you can’t rape a hooker. if you’re saying i was raped every time someone paid me for sex, you’re operating with the same mindset as someone who would claim it would have been impossible to rape me. you’re operating under the assumption that i cannot make the decision, in the moment, whether or not i consent. if anything i feel more victimized by those who would literally make me a victim by removing any semblance of choice i had, than by those who literally stuck their cocks in me and then gave me money.

[kingofstag]

got overalls today

he/him

[build-a-boi]

New haircut has me feeling amazing 😎🥶

[denseboy]

trans joy is so nice. first haircuts and first binders. shopping for clothes and feeling comfortable. looking in the mirror and feeling peace, not panic. a list of names in the notes app. "can you try using these pronouns for me? i think i like them more." other trans people who just get it. "this song/media/work of art is my gender" (no elaboration). getting gendered correctly. great surgery results and hormone updates. t4t couples. old trans people. pointing out the colors pink blue and white everywhere you go. all good stuff

[my-nonbinary-crushes]

@/mathemateacal (they/them)

[russettpotato]

a little late to my own one year on testosterone party 😂 *tony toni tone voice* it’s my manniversary!

(2021; 1 year on t // 2017; pre-t)

[greeneyesnake]

Yes, you can be a transgender woman with facial hair and hair on your legs. Stop gatekeeping and being so simple-minded. Gender is literally all made up, so do whatever the fuck you want to do. Black trans girls out there: you are worthy, you are important, and I love you.

[jordanlane13102]

Pre t vs 8 months 💉 (better comparison lol)