we're gonna rattle this ghost town

Now, at 29, I’m lowkey having a panic attack because my academic email is filled with middle schoolers wanting me to answer their questions about pygmy raccoons and I keep putting off answering them because I’m so overwhelmed with all the other raccoon stuff I have to do.

Now, at 29, I’m lowkey having a panic attack because my academic email is filled with middle schoolers wanting me to answer their questions about pygmy raccoons and I keep putting off answering them because I’m so overwhelmed with all the other raccoon stuff I have to do.

people look at wheelchair users and think "well you're sitting down all the time that doesn't take effort" no actually it does. pushing a manual chair takes a lot of fucking effort, especially without a power assist. repetitive stress injuries are a huge problem manual chair users encounter all the time. going up hills and ramps is so deeply fatiguing.

this doesn't just apply to manual chair users btw. power chair usage can also be really exhausting, especially for people with complex seating needs. going over bumps and cracks can trigger many symptoms such as spasticity, pressure sores are common, even just sitting upright can be exhausting for many people.

Powerchairs, especially those with minimal or no suspension, transfer vibrations from every bump on the ground to the person using them. That's not the same as sitting in place or sitting in a car. You also have to keep a high level of spatial awareness and proprioception at all times, and operate your chair without the biomechanical and proprioceptive feedback our brains expect to come with movement. And the body can respond in unhelpful ways to the alternative way of moving, including muscular impacts in areas you wouldn't think of when considering what muscles are active during walking - like deep back and neck muscles. Discomfort and injury related to sitting position is common in powerchair users, and tools like recline and leg elevation can't fully mitigate this - and not all chairs have those features.

it works just fine, you just can't see it on account of, well, The Void.

2. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within US Slave Culture by Vincent Woodard

3. "Abolitionists turned the tables on Europeans by accusing them of being cannibals when they ate sugar tainted with the flesh and blood of slaves."

here's the intro

"feminist theory: from margin to center" by bell hooks is a book on radical feminist theory. give it a shot. we are better allies than we are enemies.

Okay so 1. gender abolition isn't owned by radical feminism and trans forward gender abolitionist theory exists perfectly fine without your bullshit anyway. 2. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center is about the marginalization of Black women in feminism and is quite literally a criticism of everything wrong with the second wave movement and subsequently radical feminism.

radical feminism as a term has become associated with essentialism, separatism, cissexism, classism and racism and not for no reason. that has been the face of radical feminism for a hot while. "radical feminism" does have a lot more rich and complex history than people often afford it, and radical feminism did not start as one unified ideology but was an umbrella term. but the term did not get poisoned on accident and we cannot simply write off all of the harms associated with radical feminism as "not real radical feminism." even if we want to use the term "radical" in the original sense (focusing on the root causes of gender oppression, in an intersectional manner) i question how useful it is to reclaim something that is still actively being used, and is heavily associated with, a deeply harmful line of feminist thinking.

i do not like people trying to "reclaim" radical feminism for trans people because as far as i've seen, despite all insistence that its about reviving the "good" parts of radical feminism & distinguishing it from cultural feminism, people still keep doing all the shit that turned people off from radical feminism in the first place (the essentialism, separatism, cissexism, classism, racism). it seems clear that people generally think of radical feminism as primarily being defined around "mean to trans women" and when people find out things are More Complicated Than That, they jump straight to "once you remove the blatant transphobia then you have the Good Pure Kind Of Radical Feminism!" but that doesn't fix the problems, for trans people and for feminism in general.

i think if there is any reclaiming to be done with the term "radical feminism" it would have to come after there's been more of a reckoning in trans and feminist spaces with how harmful gender/bio essentialism, female separatism, cissexism is, and what it actually means to reject and resist those things. we have terms like transfeminist and visionary feminist and revolutionary feminist which can serve the exact same purpose in describing a kind of transformative, socialist, intersectional feminism that strikes at the root of gendered oppression. there's a lot of tough fucking conversations we are actively struggling to have, and the trans people i see proudly identifying as radical feminists are the ones struggling against those conversations, and repeating the mistakes of their white middle class radical feminist grandmothers.