RAHHHH

like the recent estrogen legislation. estrogen should never be made a controlled substance. everyone should have easy access to gender affirming care, including DIY. but when people try to spread awareness for this serious issue by acting like trans men arent as affected by institutional transphobia, it just becomes an argument about disinformation, because testosterone is ALREADY a controlled substance. I want estrogen to remain an uncontrolled substance because I want to save trans women from the bullshit than trans men have been having to deal with for over 30 years. and then you have a bunch of people arguing about this bullshit with each other while the law just plods on thru the government and everyone loses.

If you police the discussions of analysis that tmasc people use with "you're wrong, you clearly need to read (transfeminist text)" maybe reflect on if that text you are citing is one specifically written by or about transmasculine people, or includes any collaboration or input from tmascs at all. Which is like. Pretty much never the situation I encounter.

It's like, cool. I'm not saying that your source from a transfeminine activist/author creating a work about transmisogyny isn't an important contribution to transfeminism, or holding incredibly valuable insights (I mean these are often works I think everyone should read)- but consider that if these works specifically do not center or involve transmasculine people... why are you wielding it as the rule book to define how a discussion on transmasculinity should be held?

Why is it that tmascs need to defer the language they use to communicate their experiences to those who are not them or making any genuine effort to cite, collaborate, or include them?

Why is it automatically wrong to challenge the conclusions those kinds of texts declare about us? Is it that tmascs refuse to accept the conclusions of a work which never sought to sincerely involve them just out of ignorance or pride- or could it be because those conclusions might actually be very limited and inaccurate- no matter the quality of other aspects of the work?

And like. Importantly here.

....Transmasculine people have made contributions to transfeminist materials, you know?

Yes we are underrepresented in transfeminist texts but are we are absolutely there, currently and historically. Our underrepresentation isn't some lack of care we have either, it's quite obviously yet another byproduct of our erasure in society. We are underrepresented in many spaces of career and academia both because of the systemic barriers that exclude and prevent us from entering, and from the fact that our contributions go undervalued and unacknowledged. It is absolutely not unusual to see the curriculum of gender studies classes completely exclude texts made by transgender men and transmasculine people. But they do exist.

Maybe these discussions and ideas of transmasculine theory are so new and shocking to you because you've never taken the time to flesh out your understanding of transgender oppression beyond a handful of transfeminine authors who did not author their works with transmasculine people in mind nor in partnership?

Again. This is not saying these aren't important works, but it should not be so controversial to state they just are not always going to be entirely applicable as the framework through which all other approaches to transfeminism must orbit. Nor is it that are they flawless objects that should not be criticized. Examining the successes and the failures of a text is essential critical analysis & media literacy. Especially in areas of theory.

To treat these works as universal representatives of transgender experience and incapable of having limitations or blind spots is foolish. It is standard practice to go to directly to marginalized people themselves to understand their perspectives and lives, not others. Transmasculine people are not the exception to that.

It just is incredibly telling that the texts consistently quoted at transmasc people to talk down to us about how we need to be properly educated on our place in transfeminism are never texts from transmasculine people themselves. It is self explanatory how you've reached the conclusion it is acceptable to demand transmasculine voices be decentered when you've built an understanding of us from texts which do not make the effort to involve us, but will still try to speak concretely about and for us.

You just sometimes encounter such prideful complicity in total ignorance to tmasc lives which will even myopically promote there are no transmasc texts in transfeminist academia in the first place.

Whatever it was, to put it this way, if there were 10 studies on the trans community as a whole, there were 3 on trans women and trans fems and 0 on trans men and trans mascs, and 0 on nonbinary people. All of the mixed studies were also pretty much useless for my purposes as well because they were all so lopsided.

I think I swapped to a bunch of different things - addiction rates, smoking, depression, mental health in general - nothing that was even roughly equal in looking at all of us. Trans men, trans mascs and nonbinary people are so under researched as to be nonexistent.

Well Ubuntu is a wonderful and free OS you can get to replace it, but in the mean time I usually recommend these two edits to make windows run faster.

ADJUST ADVANCED SETTINGS

search for 'View Advanced System Settings' and click on the control panel view that pops up.

You should be in the Advanced tab, click on the Settings... button.

You will probably see all these turned on. TURN THEM OFF! You will probably want 'Smooth edges of screen fonts' to stay on since the font gets very pixelated without it. I also leave 'Show thumbnails instead of icons' since I personally like seeing image previews in File Explorer.

Your windows will feel much different after turning lots of these off, come back here and make adjustments if needed.

Ok second edit

DISABLE WEB SEARCH

This requires what is know as a RegEdit. These directions will only add one Key:Value DWORD pair via the PowerShell terminal. But do know, deleting the wrong thing in Registry Editor can break your computer. We will be creating this Key with PowerShell so it will not delete anything in your Registry but if it makes you uncomfortable then please skip this step!

Windows added a bunch of behind the scene web searches all over the place, when you click the start button, Web Search! when you open file explorer, Web Search! What is it web searching? who knows! but it lags anything that interacts with it, which is everything, Thanks Windows.

You can turn this web search off by making this registry edit.

First search for PowerShell > Open

Once the terminal opens type in:

Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search" -Name "BingSearchEnabled" -Value 0

Mine has fancy color coding, yours might not!

This Set-ItemProperty command will create a new Key Item at location "HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search" inside our Registry, it will call this key "BingSearchEnabled" and set its value to 0 (the zero value turns it off).

Reboot your computer and the new Key will load into your windows and Look At That no more unnecessary web searching happening in the background.

It is made of awesome

Gaming Dice.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

its a take from the perspective that trans men are "vulnerable" is some vague abstract generalized way, not in a way which would behoove anyone to adjust their behavior or take action on their behalf. its the erasure of erasure; the assumption is that trans men probably have enough resources and support anyways, which could not be farther from the truth. some local communities may have more transmasc-focused resources, but many others do not. transmasculine people are left out of vital conversations, are excluded from vital resources, are ignored and forgotten when they are abused and killed.

it treats transmasc erasure as something which is passive in itself and which can be solved passively. which is erasure itself in action. i do not really give a fuck about "who has it worse," it is not about that. it is about the fact that if YOU do not make an ACTIVE EFFORT to advocate for transmascs, to make transmasc suffering and oppression visible and legible, it will not happen. it simply will not happen.

erasure is an active force. we all internalize transmasculine erasure and we can all easily contribute to it; we are expected to contribute to it. trans men&mascs cannot afford the model of "well we only need to raise awareness for the most vulnerable" because our vulnerability is defined by being ignored.

or trans men like Sophie Lederer, who was only 19 when he was arrested for "talking silly and claiming to be a boy" in the early 20th century, and the only other thing I know about him is that he spent the rest of his life, over a decade, institutionalized for his transmasculinity. god only fucking knows what was done to him in those years by his wardens.