I miss you, harpy. I wish you were still here. I love you. Im glad you're not in pain anymore. Thank you for being my family. Thank you for being.

I am not reassured to know that when my existence becomes illegal and my bloodstream is criminalized that many heartfelt posts will be made to Instagram all saying the same things to the same people that as the fragile web of our lives is torn apart as our communities fracture and collapse while our futures are erased hundreds will hold up signs and march laps around the capitol and they will sign petitions for ballot measures which will not pass I am not reassured to know that when my sisters are imprisoned for resisting cruelty for refusing to be silent or simply refusing to hide many really very good speeches will be written about it and delivered by passionate speakers to well-attended rallies which will seed movements and grow whole organizations to perform more rallies I am not reassured to know that when we lose our jobs and our housing as we die in the street are put down by the tyrant state or are murdered by mobs of hateful bigots that a very brave few souls groups of promising children and might-as-well-be-saints will grow tired of chanting slogans into traffic and join us in prison for blockading a road or doorway perhaps smashing some windows or occupying some building in a beautiful abstract symbol of theoretical revolution that will surely be remembered for generations as very inspiring no, I am not reassured to know that when I finally kill myself like my many sisters before me it will make many people very sad who will know nothing about me they will hold a vigil for me where they light several candles and argue with each other and go home feeling strange and unsatisfied just like we did.

Had to look extra cute for my meeting today. I think I pulled it off.

One of the best thing you can do for native pollinators in your area is Leave the Leaves!

Leave the leaves indeed.

— Quote by Leslie Feinberg, from TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism, issue 7, volume 1. 1995.

you've all forgotten your roots anyway here's bulma waking up surrounded by garbage and then immediately chugging a warm beer she picked up off the floor

Richard Quinn | Fall/Winter 2024

"Helping the starving American-style" USSR c. 1970s.

BARBIE (2023) via @wbpictures_br

In this book you focus on the idea of gender as a global ‘phantasm’ – this charged, overdetermined, anxiety- and fear-inducing cluster of fantasies that is being weaponised by the right. How did you go about starting to investigate that? Judith Butler: When I was burned in effigy in Brazil in 2017, I could see people screaming about gender, and they understood ‘gender’ to mean ‘paedophilia.’ And then I heard people in France describing gender as a Jewish intellectual movement imported from the US. This book started because I had to figure out what gender had become. I was naïve. I was stupid. I had no idea that it had become this flash point for right-wing movements throughout the world. So I started doing the work to reconstruct why I was being called a paedophile, and why that woman in the airport wanted to kill me with the trolley. I’m not offering a new theory of gender here; I’m tracking this phantasm’s formation and circulation and how it’s linked to emerging authoritarianism, how it stokes fear to expand state powers. Luckily, I was able to contact a lot of people who translated Gender Trouble in different parts of the world, who were often gender activists and scholars in their own right. They told me about what’s happening in Serbia, what’s happening in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Russia. So I became a student of gender again. I’ve been out of the field for a while. I stay relatively literate, of course, but I’ve written on war, on ethics, on violence, on nonviolence, on the pandemic… I’m not in gender studies all the time. I had to do a lot of reading.  There’s a lot of focus in the book on how the anti-gender movement has moved across the world in the past few decades, and how it’s inextricable from Catholic doctrine. It was clarifying for me; domestic anti-trans movements in the UK mostly self-identify as secular.  Judith Butler: In the UK, and even in the US, people don’t realise that this anti-gender ideology movement has been going on for some time in the Americas, in central Europe, to a certain degree in Africa, and that it’s arrived in the US by different routes, but it’s arrived without announcing its history. It became clear to me that a lot of the trans-exclusionary feminists didn’t realise where their discourse was coming from. Some of them do; some people who call themselves feminists are aligned with right-wing positions, and it’s confusing, but there it is. There’s an uncomfortable history of fascist feminism in movements like British suffragism, for instance. Judith Butler: Yes, and of racism. But when Putin made clear that he agreed with JK Rowling, she was probably surprised, and she rightly said, ‘no, I don’t want your alliance’, but it was an occasion for her to think about who she’s allying herself with, unwittingly or not. The anti-gender movement was first and foremost a defence of Biblical scripture, and of the idea that God created man and woman, and that the human form exists only in this duality and that without it, the human is destroyed – God’s creation is destroyed. So that morphed, as the Vatican’s doctrine moved into Latin America, into the idea that people who advocate ‘gender’ are forces of destruction who seek to destroy man, woman, the human, civilisation and culture. 

My results have gone from 90% AI bullshit to ~60% usable - which frankly at this point is a huge improvement.

A true hero & legend whose memory will be a blessing ❤️