Top: The Onion two weeks ago.

From an excellent post by Jason Davis

From Washington, D.C., the rings would only fill a portion of the sky, but appear striking nonetheless. Here, we see them at sunrise.

From Guatemala, only 14 degrees above the equator, the rings would begin to stretch across the horizon. Their reflected light would make the moon much brighter.

From Earth’s equator, Saturn’s rings would be viewed edge-on, appearing as a thin, bright line bisecting the sky.

At the March and September equinoxes, the Sun would be positioned directly over the rings, casting a dramatic shadow at the equator.

At midnight at the Tropic of Capricorn, which sits at 23 degrees south latitude, the Earth casts a shadow over the middle of the rings, while the outer portions remain lit.

idk man you tell me

“No one cares about Skullgirls, it was a niche fighting game that doesn’t have the fanbase to make ANOTHER niche title asking for 1.5mil to work. The money just isn’t there. Try to milk that pathetic Indiegogo campaign all you want, it ain’t gonna happen. That’s not defeatist, it’s realist and knowing limitations and the market. I’ll be here to tell you I told you so when Indivisible fails to make its funding.”

The downsides of being a closet trans girl.

If you’ve been around tumblr trans communities long enough you’ve heard of the idea and critique of treating CASAB (Coercively Assigned Sex At Birth) as a coherent class of people. I don’t think a lot of people realize the true implications of this, so borrowing from some of what medicine was talking about, I’m going to expand on that critique a little.

CASAB/CSAB/DSAB/ASAB terminology came about to decenter the ideas of “biological” sex, to center the assignment aspect of sex/gender. This is helpful because by displacing essentialism from our positionality and socialization into gendered hierarchies, gendered production of knowledge of the body and the apparatuses of power as it relates to gender, we can more fully understand how the very categories of ‘sex’ arise not as a natural inherent trait but as a set of discourses within a network of power. It calls attention to the constructiveness of sex.

The ideal of using CASAB language was to remove essentialism from the discussion entirely. The practice of CASAB language, and note that I am not calling for it to no longer be used (at this time anyway), was simply the reinforcement and creation of new essentialisms.

In a lot of transmisogynist radical feminism, the language is slightly different but the effect remains the same, of using CASAB as a vantage point to make essentialist arguments. Transmisogynist radical feminism constructs CAFAB (Coercively Assigned Female At Birth) as a singular ‘female’ class oppressed and exploited by a CAMAB (Coercively Assigned Male At Birth) class. This means that cis women, trans men and cafab genderqueer/non-binary persons are all claimed as a singular oppressed group by cis men, trans women and camab genderqueer-non-binary people. This logic falls apart when you do any critical thought about all of these people’s positions within patriarchy.

Transmisogynist Radical Feminism uses biological sex as its basis for essentialism, whereas a lot of Radical Trans Woman Feminism strictly uses birth assignment, though it might as well be biological sex. Rad Trans Feminism, on tumblr that is, constructs a CAMAB group of people who have an inherent closer connection to womanhood than CAFABs, who are all potential men or are aligned with men inherently, due to their relationship to transmisogyny. It is an exact mirror image of transmisogynist radical feminism - with CAMAB as womanhood and CAFAB as manhood, instead. CASAB has just become a different way to reference the legitimacy of biological sex, of inherent traits belonging to us that exist outside of human construction. Welcome to the new essentialism, same as the old essentialism. CASAB language has also entered the realm of liberal identity politics - in which “people with vaginas/uteruses/ovaries” and “people with penises/prostates/testicles” has simply replaced ‘biological female’ and ‘biological male,’ and CASAB is short-hand for all of this. The reason why this language is not “inclusive” is that it makes the same exact argumentation and assumptions of biology that we could hear from the two before mentioned groups (mostly the transmisogynist variant though). Posts that make claims about “people with penises,”  assuming all are men and then being lauded as ‘trans inclusive’ are not uncommon on tumblr. In all of these cases, the attempt to subvert essentialism has merely recreated it.

When I and others make the claim that terfs espouse a white supremacist, imperialist and colonial ideology inherent to their claims of sex* - it is the essentialism of placing these variantly positioned gendered subjects as being part of a singular group that receives the same material exploitation and experiences the same alienation that we are challenging. Why is it different when other people do it?

why can’t we just get a group of friends and live happily ever after in an apartment and share the profits

- the nuclear family unit is the easiest to exploit under capitalism, because parents have to work externally to provide for their children. They work to pay for child care for their children while they work. They work to earn money to feed their kids and to give them nice things to make up for all the time they spend away, at work.

- a huge amount of labour is necessary every day to keep a family fed, their house clean, etc. some families are wealthy enough to outsource this by hiring staff, most are not.

- capitalism is a pointless middleman in this. we should just live cooperatively.

- share houses and intentional communities are awesome

- people of different life stages function well together because they have complimentary needs and abilities

- kids are less of a stress and burden in a home with lots of different adults to provide support and love, as well as sharing household tasks.