solstice

They don't want people to understand that "the problem" they have is that the jeans aren't made for them. Manufacturers prefer for them to continue buying jeans they don't like and feeling like their body is the problem.

Let's imagine a pretty simple dress with straps instead of sleeves and a skirt that starts at the natural waist. Even there, I encounter a problem where the straps are often long enough on me that my entire boobs would hang out of the dress entirely. Then the actual bodice needs to be within a pretty narrow range to be the right size for my boobs, and then there's a separate narrow range for it to be the right size for my natural waist. Plus a distance between the top and my natural waist, of course. And yet another for my hips/butt. And then my ratio between how much my butt sticks out back and my stomach sticks out front has to match with the assumption the maker made or else the hem will be uneven. For a dress made like this out of woven material, it's not uncommon for people to only really *properly* fit into them during a single part of the month, and find them too tight or too loose when their weight changes with their cycle. (Stretch materials are thankfully usually good enough to handle this much variation, at least)

And that's a dress! We don't even have to perfectly fit so many aspects of the whole crotch nightmare region you get with pants and shorts!

We can see an improvement already if I split the garment into two. Now I only need the shirt to match me on the strap length, bust range, and natural waist. And notably, the length suddenly has a much wider range of allowance. It can be significantly "too long" for my body and it's basically fine, because I can tuck it into the skirt.

And then if the skirt's waistband is too wide for my natural waist, I might be able to wear it lower.

By separating the garments we have made some measurements suddenly almost irrelevant and we reduce the number that need to correlate with each other on a single garment.

We can do this more. Historically, we did this more. If you look at various times in history, for example, one of those fancy-looking (to us) dress bodices might be somewhere between 2-4 separate pieces held onto the body via being pinned to the stays beneath. By trading off some difficulty in getting dressed and using a very sturdy and very adjustable undergarment, they can have garment pieces that always look basically perfectly fitted even as the body changes shape.

There are also other methods. One option is clothing that is layered and cinched into shape. With fewer layers, you have stuff like the chiton and the toga. With more, you have stuff like kimono and hanfu.

My point with all of this is: I think a better world is possible. But merely listing all the measurements, while an improvement perhaps and a step towards demystifying clothing, would not be enough.

Sewing clothing solely to order at highly specific measurements is also ridiculous as a general practice and shouldn't be the answer for most regular-use clothing. Standard sizes have huge benefits for the labor efficiency of clothes manufacturing, which you should care about if you don't want to waste human time.

Last year I watched two prominent Black disability advocates die due to unmet mutual aid needs. Both were well-known and well-loved, and neither of them were able to meet mutual aid needs they needed to stay alive.

The past three years I’ve been watching BIPOC and trans accounts slowly stop posting or disappear from Twitter, Bluesky, Tumblr, and other platforms. In most cases, I have no way of knowing if they departed for their own mental health, or if they’re even still alive.

For the past two years, I’ve been thinking over and over again “if these well-known and beloved people weren’t able to survive, to meet basic needs to stay alive, how the fuck are my friends who are Black, trans, AND disabled going to make it? How long until their mutual aid being ignored kills them?”

Because here’s the thing - for a lot of disabled people of ALL stripes, online sex work or mutual aid passed through online means is the only way we can survive and doing so to meet rent alone is often an equivalent in effort OR MORE to working other online-based jobs. When we can’t work anymore or are deemed unemployable due to our medical needs/symptoms, there’s only so much we can do if we cannot rely on a partner or family to keep us alive and housed.

But on another side, many trans people still “able to work”, especially transfeminine people, are considered inherently unemployable as well or are treated to such horrible working conditions that it becomes completely untenable. As an example, 47% of trans people without a degree are unemployed, and even trans people with a degree are five times more likely to be unemployed. 49% of trans people of color have been denied AT LEAST one job explicitly due to being trans, half experience workplace harassment such as being forced to present as the wrong gender or being denied access to appropriate restrooms, and 21% of TPOC report having been physically or sexually assaulted in the workplace.

For a lot of us, online spaces such as blogs are not just “online communities” or “nice places to waste time” but literal lifelines either regularly or when we lose our extremely tenuous grip on stability. Systemic or communal harassment campaigns that drive marginalized people off of sites repeatedly for real or invented slights or wrongs are more than simply denying them access to “community”, but can be quite literally a death sentence for them. Sometimes the ramifications are as “light” as meaning the target can no longer fundraise for gender-affirming care or surgery, or as heavy as leading to them becoming homeless or dying.

And frankly, the people who do it will often never know how many people they’ve killed, or are actively proud of “getting rid of the bad ones.” This can be over fandomite discourse, an invented harassment campaign, or actual actions. The point is the power, the punishment, the suffering.

Some targets are more tenacious than others - a couple people on tumblr have created upwards of 40 accounts out of pure spite. But when you add the strain, energy, and time of dealing with a harassment campaign to what they already needed to survive, most of their waking hours become devoted to the effort of surviving an attempted social murder.

Because that IS exactly what it is, an attempted social murder of marginalized people in one of the only spaces they may be able to use to survive. Systemic and communal attempts to kill the undesirables did not stagnate as we entered a digital era, they evolved along with our evolution of new ways to survive. They literally segregate away racialized community members via algorithms in some areas, while expending a deranged amount of comparative resources to directly sniping marginalized accounts in others. How many Palestinian bloggers have you seen constantly being account restricted or losing their accounts for the crime of trying to survive their extermination? How many trans women have you watched have their account terminated within a day of being made? How many GFMs from racialized trans people have you watched go unfilled and ignored for weeks to months?

Me: “I’ve been watching marginalized people slowly disappear or die due to mutual aid not being met for years, and harassment campaigns seek to make this worse historically and currently”

Anon: “every one of them was a pedophile-loving drain on society and-“

Like I ain’t even talking bout that, I’m talking about the fact that every fucking week I watch multiple marginalized people struggle or fail in trying to baseline survive, often while their blogs are constantly targeted or harassed by either other users or the platform for a myriad of different reasons, with the internet as their only real lifeline. To assume a social media account is just a luxury and not a critical facet of survival for many marginalized people is so fucking disconnected with the current state of things it’s wild. @chingaderita has been begging for money for her kids healthcare for MONTHS, as one example. I have friends who have to go without meds if their mutual aid doesn’t raise enough money for them because over half the time they CANNOT work.

“Oh but what about the white trans women we target-“ half the trans women, racialized or not, that I know on here are either too disabled to work or live in places it is not safe for them to get work (if they can even get hired at all as a trans woman) anymore. You all also relentlessly mock any disabled trans woman that tries to survive by asking for mutual aid or doing sex work while being disabled.

"Social death is used to describe the ways in which someone is treated as if they were dead or non-existent. Social death is distinguished from biological or physical death: when the body is considered to have died and ceased functioning for life. Social death can occur before or after physical death."

-Via E. Borgstrom

Thinking about how people think this is just transfemmes whining about losing a blog and not losing a means to keep a roof over our head, to be able to eat or access meds, how it’s all at the whims of transmisogynistic pieces of shit who harass us endlessly, and a staff that goes after us for fun.

You can access it here. Please reblog this post when you see it so more folks can get access and so I can get more recommendations to add to it lmfao

This archive isn't complete, as no archive ever is. I'm constantly taking suggestions on what to add to it or changes to make. If you'd like to see something added to the archives or are having technical difficulties, please send me a DM. Current content categories and archivist's note below cut.

"Anonsee, what is Transfeminist Womanism?"

Transfeminist Womanism itself is a synthesis of both eponymous ideologies, seeking to fill the gaps formed within each that often leave out Black trans women - racism within transfeminism, transmisogyny within womanism - when Black trans women are often the people that need those ideologies the most. Transfeminist Womanism is a primarily Abolitionist ideology, finding value in the rhetoric, knowledge, tactics, and tools of anarchism, communism, and other ideologies without falling directly into any of those categories.

Additionally, I've curated a "Foundational" folder that gives guided reading to help understand the underlying principles and thoughts behind Transfeminist Womanism.

If you're an author of works in the archives and you'd like to be added to the tip list, please send me a DM and I'll add your information. For fiction titles and art, I'm only accepting works from Black and/or transfemme authors/artists to be added to the archives.

NEW: If you are Black and/or Transfemme and would like to potentially include your art in the archive - visual, audio, or otherwise so long as its digital, DM me!

If you'd like to tip me for curating this archive, you can do so through vmo @AnonseeStoryweaver or Cshapp $tshenta

Works within these archives primarily focus on the following topics:

-Transfeminism

-Womanism ("Black Feminism")

-Disability Justice

-Restorative and Transformative Justice

-Ecofeminism

and subjects related to them.

Cambridge professor of sociology Jason Arday is accused of plagiarism by another academic

the accuser is a "race realist" who believes that in a true meritocracy all university professors would be white. this is somehow not acknowledged much during the entire ordeal

this leads to several days of media coverage demanding an investigation, or that Arday is expelled from his post immediately

somehow this accusation that has no effect on the lives of 99.99% of the population becomes FRONT PAGE NEWS in all the newspapers for multiple days, above anything else happening in the UK or the world at large

following intense media scrutiny, Arday resigns his post as a Cambridge professor

today, august 14th, days after resigning, Arday is found dead at his home in Battersea

This article by professor Kehinde Andrews clarifies more about the story of racist harassment Arday has been suffering since he fucking got a teaching job at Cambridge in the first place, in 2023, as the FIRST Black professor in that fucking stupid institution, who sure is taking it's sweet time defending their worker, despite already fucking checking his work for plagiarism and saying he didn't do it:

https://www.voice-online.co.uk/opinion/comment/2026/08/07/ardays-resignation/

1. He wasn’t the first Black Professor at Cambridge, but he WAS the youngest X

2. He was ALSO autistic, and nonverbal for the first 11 years of his life X

like a transfem seperated from anybody who will understand their specific experience will be much less likely to notice when theyre being mistreated, which was our experience up until like, this year. transfems, i beg you, make an effort to meet other transfems. make sure youre surrounded by people who get you, ESPECIALLY if youre newly out. this doesnt mean cut off any non-transfem friend, obviously (i shouldnt have to clarify this but i know people will accuse me of being a seperationist if i dont) (pro tip run in the other direction from people who say that).