heeeyyyyy

And sometimes he and Roaring Abel smoked fiercely the whole evening and never said a word, while Cissy lay in the hammock swung between the verandah posts and Valancy sat idly on the steps, her hands clasped over her knees, and wondered dreamily if she were really Valancy Stirling and if it were only three weeks since she had left the ugly old house on Elm Street.

🏰HAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAY TO THE BLUE CASTLE!

For the 100th birthday of one of my favorite books, I commissioned @sparemoon to do an art piece of Valancy, Barney, Cissy, and Roaring Abel. There were certain elements from the book that I wanted in the piece, and @sparemoon combined them all so skillfully and with the beauty and wonder that the book evokes, I could cry looking at this. I'm particularly thrilled that we now have art with Cissy and Roaring Abel, and more of Valancy and Barney.

its a take from the perspective that trans men are "vulnerable" is some vague abstract generalized way, not in a way which would behoove anyone to adjust their behavior or take action on their behalf. its the erasure of erasure; the assumption is that trans men probably have enough resources and support anyways, which could not be farther from the truth. some local communities may have more transmasc-focused resources, but many others do not. transmasculine people are left out of vital conversations, are excluded from vital resources, are ignored and forgotten when they are abused and killed.

it treats transmasc erasure as something which is passive in itself and which can be solved passively. which is erasure itself in action. i do not really give a fuck about "who has it worse," it is not about that. it is about the fact that if YOU do not make an ACTIVE EFFORT to advocate for transmascs, to make transmasc suffering and oppression visible and legible, it will not happen. it simply will not happen.

erasure is an active force. we all internalize transmasculine erasure and we can all easily contribute to it; we are expected to contribute to it. trans men&mascs cannot afford the model of "well we only need to raise awareness for the most vulnerable" because our vulnerability is defined by being ignored.

or trans men like Sophie Lederer, who was only 19 when he was arrested for "talking silly and claiming to be a boy" in the early 20th century, and the only other thing I know about him is that he spent the rest of his life, over a decade, institutionalized for his transmasculinity. god only fucking knows what was done to him in those years by his wardens.

"Unless they present hyperfeminine, butches don’t have access to the job market. You will not be considered if you don’t wear nice women’s clothes. If you set up catering, you will get told, “I am disgusted; a woman who thinks she’s a man is cooking for me.” So butch lesbians normally have an assistant, or their femme partner if they have one, who is more feminine-looking to run the front so customers don’t know a masculine-presenting person is cooking behind the curtains. Many of us become sex workers [due to lack of job opportunities].… But then when police raid brothels and homes, the masculine lesbians get treated “like men.” This means more forceful handcuffing, kneeling, and stripping their shirts off." – Rosa, lesbian and sex worker rights defender El Salvador

i was thinking about this when it comes to how we describe vulnerability in our community, specifically mentioning someone is a "femme" to indicate their need for extra support. i don't know i've ever seen the same be done for butches. i genuinely cannot remember ever really seeing people talk about butches and their economic and social vulnerability, the way i see people talk about femmes.

its not that being feminine doesn't cause genuine vulnerability! but because people have such a binary attitude towards gender (and more broadly), the way we talk about gendered vulnerability leads to this view that feminine people are always more vulnerable than masculine people, that "this femme needs help" to many queers and feminists feels more urgent than "this butch needs help."

this is where we get the constant refrain of "the patriarchy likes masculinity, so masculine people are always seen as better than feminine people" & why people may find it incomprehensible that there may be situations where being feminine may be a protective factor in comparison to being masculine.

another example of this from this article:

The trio made their way down a busy street in the Santiago suburb of Pudahuel, close to where Carolina lived with her mother and father. Carolina and Estefania chose not to hold hands to avoid offending anyone. Suddenly, Carolina felt a force to the back of her head. Then darkness. She had fallen unconscious, and would remain in a coma for a week. She suffered a fractured skull, a broken nose, internal bleeding and permanent damage to her hearing. There were two male attackers. One had used a large wooden pole to hit her repeatedly on the back of her head, only stopping when Estefania threw herself on top of Carolina, using her body as a shield. This is significant, says Carolina's mother, Mariela. Because unlike Carolina, who identifies as a camiona and dresses accordingly, Estefania is femme - a more feminine lesbian identity. The attackers targeted Carolina and not Estefania, says Mariela, because she represented an "unacceptable" face of womanhood. It was not just her sexual orientation that prompted violence, it was her appearance as a camiona. "I want to make it very clear they were trying to kill her," she adds. "There is no other way of looking at it. The fact that she is here is a miracle." Carolina knew one of her alleged attackers. "Before this attack he threatened me. He said, 'I am going to kill you.' He said he was going to shoot me with a gun. He called me a lesbian and swore at me. He said, 'Why do you dress like a man?'"

there are people who have been nearly (or successfully) violently murdered for being seen as a masculine woman, while their femme girlfriends were not targeted or were not the main target. but if you reduce everything in patriarchy down to "m > f" you will miss this. and

... during the finale, a cat arrived, and mingled with the performers. [Figaro] chased it from one side, it returned from the other side to throw itself at the legs of [Bartolo]. ... the audience imitated its meows and encouraged it to continue its improvised role.

Still on this scene, and likely to come back to it.

I think its really fascinating that Maia lands on asset forfeiture, as his imperial power of choice so early on and just sticks with it right to the end of the series.

This is something I essentially didn't notice at all on my first time through the series but which I notice more and more every subsequent rereading for this whole long list of reasons:

It does a lot of work to set the tone of book, and the series more broadly. This is a weird, policy-wonk friendly political tool, that most readers won't have and will never encounter directly in their real lives. And because its a big multi-stage bureaucratic undertaking, it forces the action off screen. Even when we see Maia make changes, sometimes really big changes, we never look at them directly. We have the knowledge that, because Maia has decided this, a bunch of stuff is going to happen. But like Maia, we won't get to see any of it happen. Contrast with the other major legal penalty we see carried out in this series, execution. Execution does very much happen on screen, and Maia hates having to hand down that sentence and tries to avoid it whenever he can.

It carries a surprising amount of world-building with it. Maia doesn't actually go a lot of places or physically set his eyes on most of his civil service infrastructure, which means we don't get to see it either. But every time Maia sets one of these large-scale bureaucratic sentences in motion it describes by implication that this is a society that has and can support a large, modern civil service which helps you not get confused and start having expectations more in line with the more common "medieval" fantasy settings.

Its a clear product of Maia's personal history and education. Some of Maia's education is what he picked up from Setheris, but most of his policy education comes from Berenar, who has been running the treasury for years, and he's falling back on a tool that will rely on the imperial accountants.

-Yes, a guard dog

-Yes, an attack dog

-Yes, a lapdog

-Yes, multiple/all of these

-No

-See results