dirt and dirt byproducts

Fiona Finnegan

Crystal gazing, the burning house, 2023

all people assigned "female" are punished for engaging in things deemed to be lowering their value to men, or for appearing overly resentful of mistreatment by men, but there is a real shift socially when a person stops internalizing this (believing that their value to men is their value and that they are "broken" or "worthless" if they cannot provide expected labor or status to men, or believing that their resentment is a result of their own psychology or trauma to be unlearned or recovered from) and starts defending their right to the full range of human expression and behavior & openly challenging misogyny itself.

everyone is punished for gender nonconformity to various degrees, but there is a real political shift when a population stops believing that sexgender assignment is just "accidentally incorrect in 1% of cases" and starts identifying that it is a structure to facilitate a legal and economic class system, and that this system can be overthrown.

assignment enforcement is often a collective societal response that functions to isolate those who challenge their assignment, so it's easy to individualize one's own discomfort with assignment (to believe it's our responsibility to manage our discomfort alone, either through suppressing it entirely or degrading ourselves seeking permission from cis authority to make decisions about our own bodies under their supervision and with a paper trail that can be used against us).

but gender operates socially. by virtue of being social beings connected with each other in a thousand ways, we have the power to influence it collectively.