intersex? isnt that where the sex is supposed 2 be

If anyone in the trans community still believes that: 1.) The "AFAB Experience/Body/Whatever is one cohesive experience that #bonds you together and makes you safe aroud each other,

and

2.) The "AMAB Experience/Body/Whatever is one cohesive experience that ~socializes~ predators and makes you unsafe around them,

Then you are blatantly transmisogynistic and intersexist.

"Well what if my space is just for people with vaginas and uteruses to talk about our reproductive issues-" assuming all people afab have vaginas and uteruses, and that no person amab has a vagina and uterus, is transmisogyny and intersexism.

"Well what if my space is for people who share the ayfab childhood experience-" I can guarantee there are very few things you as a person afab grew up experiencing that some brand of trans woman or intersex person amab could never experience.

"Well it's just that a lot of people have trauma around penises-" if you think all people amab have penises and that nobody afab has a penis you are just stupid.

If you believe in ~ayfab spaces~ and ~ayfab solidarity~ than you are dangerous. To transfeminine people, and to all brands of intersex people (even a lot of intersex people afab, because even they end up being excluded on the basis of their natural features, and when they are included are violently left out as soon as it's realized that a single word on their birth certificate doesn't in fact give you the perisex ~ayfab experience and/or body~)

I love you forever intersex people assigned female at birth who identify as transfem / a trans woman

I love you forever intersex people assigned male at birth who identify as a cis woman

I love you forever intersex people assigned female at birth who identify as a cis man

And I love you intersex cistrans people

I'm just baffled that anyone is treating this as a metaphor when slavery is still very real.

Like my childhood Haggadah talks about Go Down, Moses and what the Exodus story meant to enslaved people and how it gave people hope. It talks about calling Harriet Tubman Moses and how people were ready to die to be free. There's a passage about concentration camps and how Jews were enslaved during the Holocaust and forced to work, but the story still provided comfort that some day, they'd be free.

But it also talks about modern day slavery in the agricultural industry. There's a section about forced labor of migrant workers and that this is an existing slavery, and as Jews, we're obligated to work to free people. I believe it specifically mentions grape pickers and Caesar Chavez. (It was an old Haggadah and I lost it when I moved to college so I can't find the publisher or editor or anything)

I just... Can't imagine slavery as a METAPHOR. Metaphor for what? There are people who are enslaved right now! In the US! It's shockingly common in agriculture and hospitality. This isn't a past tragedy. And US slavery isn't that long ago either. We're barely 150 years past slavery, which means that people alive today could feasibly have great-grandparents who were enslaved. (Not counting prison slavery.)

It only highlights that chattel slavery is simply not real to most people at the seder. It lives entirely in the head, maybe tugs at the heartstrings, but it doesn’t punch them in the gut in the same way that the Holocaust does.

Specifically, what do you mean by “treating it as a metaphor”?

This isn’t meant as a “explain yourself to me so I view you as valid” thing. This is a “please expand on that. I’m intrigued” thing.

Also, I’m curious about your issue regarding “go down Moses” specifically, as well. I’m no expert in the song, but I do know it is an African-American spiritual that has intense ties to African slavery in the US. At the same time, the story of Moses and the Exodus is fundamental to Judaism in general and Pesach specifically. My family Haggadahs don’t have that song or its lyrics anywhere on them, and I genuinely don’t know how I’d feel about it if they did. On the one hand, I’d be super uncomfortable with the whole idea of co-opting a meaningful part of African American slave narratives for the purpose of a Jewish religious practice. On the other hand, it is a fundamentally Jewish story underpinned contextually by the more recent horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.

How enslaved Africans came across the story of Moses in the first place. Hint: they weren't asked politely if they wanted to.

Spirituals using coded language for plans to run away

"Slave bibles" that removed the entire Book of Exodus

To add for those following along, let me illustrate something about chattel slavery and span of Jewish history.

If we compress all 3,500 years or so of Jewish history into one 365-day year, each day would be about 9.6 years (let's round that up to 10 years).

The Emancipation Proclamation was in 1863. 163 years ago. In this compressed timeliness, that's 16.3 days. A little over 2 weeks from the end of the year, around December 15.

Precisely. You get it. There is a certain dissonance that happens when someone who owes their very existence on American soil to chattel slavery shows up at an American Jewish seder and listen to people talk about things that are not chattel slavery as if they are chattel slavery, or try to universalize that particular experience to all struggles for liberation, as if America has already done the work of uprooting the consequences of chattel slavery.

Reminder that casting the ring into the fire was the right thing to do, and keeping it is objectively insane

Lots of love to our Ashkenazi brethren, some of my best sisters married Ashkenazim, but they are 100% UNDISPUTEDLY Isildor in this scenario. Don't even try to make Sephardim the weird ones here

Just say "elemental construct" or something.

Magic caster created golem? That's a magical construct.

Naturally occurring golem? That's an elemental.

-

A setting without Jews by definition cannot have golems.

In the present the reader is introduced to Alice Cohen as she receives her inheritance from her recently deceased grandmother. This inheritance consists of a lone house in an area of Brooklyn where all the other buildings have been torn down. One of the first things that Alice discovers is a walled off section in the basement from which a voice calls to her to read stories. Alice's first choice for this is her grandmother's diary.

^ small excerpt

It just fucking fits. It’s so easy. I’m not remotely Jewish by any definition of the word, so I cannot speak for anybody, but instead I offer you this very practical taken on “golem.”

Let’s say you hear conflicting takes by Jewish folk on whether or not you can use “golem.” Some say you can, some say you can’t.

Rather than making it a moral matter — consider, some folks asked you not to and said it sucks, and you know they’ve got a fair argument even if you don’t agree with it. Since it’s so easy to not do, why not just, not be a dick?

If you want to look at it not as a moral matter, but look in purely practical terms, by refusing the request to call it anything else, it’s bein’ a bit of a dick.

Not because I have anything against Judaism in particular.

Not because I'm particularly attached to "golem" as a term.

No, it's because this is a stupid hill to die on.

Fantasy steals. It appropriates. It uses familiar terms so that people don't have to check a glossary to keep track of a bunch of terms that they won't remember because every piece of media out there is suddenly making up their own words for shit. And you know what? Fantasy steals from everyone, without prejudice. The only qualifier is that the word be well enough known that people will know what you're talking about.

So, if anything, having your word used as a general fantasy term means that your myth was considered recognizable enough to be used for clarity.

"you'll be neither the first nor the last to find a fantasy work sacrilegious."

I see it as potentially one-directional. It's okay if it's a marginalized culture using myths and folklore from the marginalizing cultures -- you wanted me to assimilate, buddy! But the other way is just ... no.

It's not that I think it's sacrilegious, I think it's cultural appropriation! Those are different!

The golem in particular is deeply rooted in Jewish persecution and fantasies of escape from that, and erasing that context and making it into some vague Thing is...not cool. The golem is fundamentally a Jewish fantasy that Jews told about people hating Jews. You cannot remove it from this context. There are no golems without Jews. Not fantasy knockoff Jews, but Jews.

People don't actually WANT Jews in the 'melting pot' nor do they actually believe in the melting pot. They want what Jews create and build but the only "melting pot" they really want Jews to get into is a crematorium after they take everything we made that they like, because they are entitled to it by virtue of THEM being human and us being... Not/and/or directly comparable to christian hegemony. Exotic enough to fetishize, then inhuman enough to throw on the garbage heap of history and then fear like a boogeyman after not all of us die. It's deeply ironic that 10 years ago people pretended to care about Golems in D&D and Goblins in harry potter being antisemetic while remaining silent about the venomous rising Jew-Hate in progressive and also fandom spaces as they expanded along the fandom-cult model. Now they don't even have to pretend about their hobbies with Jews! It's THEIR colonized space! They Took These Things. It's theirs.

That’s the opposite of a golem. In fact, if you read a story about the Golem of Prague where the Golem goes mad and kills too many people leading to its unmaking - that’s a Christian telling of the Golem story (“those crafty jooos protected themselves too much!” -Christians, probably)

Golems are protectors, exclusively.

This means:

If you draw a hard line between "drug" and "medicine" based on current legality where you live (or any other criteria) you've gone wrong somewhere,

If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to do massive harm to someone's body, mind or well-being you've gone wrong somewhere,

If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to contribute meaningfully to someone's healing, function or happiness you've gone wrong somewhere,