for magic loves the hungry

Either way, I am getting distracted. The point was actually: someone dropped into my comments at this going: "Ha! I would argue children were more oppressed when it was legal to beat them!" And mind you. This person was American. And, uhm... Well.

I do not know how I should tell y'all. But you... do understand that it is still legal in all of the US to physically punish children as a parent, right? Like, the US never ratified the rights of children. A lot of places never did that, actually.

This is the map from Wikipedia about where children can legally be beaten by their parents or in some cases even teachers. The key is: in Green countries it is illegal alltogether, in yellow countries it is legal for parents/guardians at home to physically beat children, bright orange allows it for parents/guardians and within private schools, dark orange is generally parents/guardians and people at school, and red countries allow violence against children in pretty much any institution.

And, like, you might say: "Oh, that is actually more green countries than I thought." But... I should remind you that in the end, even in the green countries, the law against violence through parents/guardians tends to not be enforced until it reaches a level where adjacent adults will be uncomfortable.

And pretty much no country protects children and minors from non-physical stuff. Having your privacy stripped? Yeah, tough luck, nobody cares. Your parents or teachers verbally abusing and humiliating you? Yeah, tough luck, fuck you.

And many of the rules that are currently pushed for to "protect" children from evil things like *checks notes* porn and horror movies and serial kidnappers that do not actually exist pushes children into a situation where they have way, way less abilities to escape abusive homes, or abusive schooling situations. Because children and minors in general are right now heavily restricted in their freedom of movement and freedom of education.

When I first started learning about transfeminist theory, it demanded a lot of genuine effort to confront a lot of socially imposed biases that I'd absorbed without noticing them. It was a lot of reading, a lot of listening, a lot of learning new definitions. New names new theories. And through that process I effectively chose to be dead silent about learning because I didn't want to speak on a subject I wasn't well enough informed about yet. It was months before I started actually talking about what I'd learned.

And the fact of the matter is that it's hard. And being a whiny snotty little thin skinned bastard who doesn't listen to women is the easy way out.

it wasn't until I really started to examine the power dynamics at play between myself/other transfems and TME trans people that it became clear the "unity" I thought I was protecting never meaningfully existed, and that I was just being conflict avoidant and people pleasing

but then I realised that same challenge would be infinitely more funny with folks who have atypical or horror OCs

You WILL be racist. You WILL do racist things. You have ALREADY done both. Learn and move on. There's no ideological purity you can hold on to, i promise. Proving you can take the criticism without making it a big deal and practice what you preach is better than any clean slate.