GReader in Exile

Like. As a Black, transfemme, former SWer who’s been on this shitass site on the same blog somehow for a decade and change, the institutional focus on transfemmes is happening after they mostly ran out of SWers and Black folks to ruin the lives of first. They’ve always hated transfemmes, don’t get me wrong, but the past purges focused on Black folks and sex workers.

Literally every website that has gone through the process of exorcising marginalized groups has done it roughly in this order, even more recent sites like Bluesky. Bluesky’s example was the Black tech Twitter folks bringing in other marginalized groups, SWers and transfemmes helping build up the “wider site appeal” while Black folks built/investigated a lot of the user-side tools and features, then Black folks getting run off (down to 2% Black user population! By comparison, tumblr is like 6-8% depending) by horrific institutional antiblackness, SWers getting censored and making it harder to work, and then transfemmes who had carried the site culture mostly alone at that point getting targeted.

I know we are getting targeted more, but pretending that this is novel to us and not just another wave in a long line of wiping out marginalized populations from social media is frustrating because it shows how little so many of y’all cared until it affected one of your groups specifically, or are simply too new to the game to know what they’ve already been doing for years.

Not stupid! I have a bunch of overall ‘structural’ complaints about the way these diagrams theorise sex/gender, and also a bunch of more minor/petty complaints about individual components. My overall critique is that they are transphobic and intersexist despite their (supposed) function to do the opposite.

First, I think it’s important to state what the purpose of these diagrams are. They are an educational tool that act as a theoretical intervention into dominant societal conceptions of gender - ie, vagina = girl, penis = boy. The central way this intervention happens is by disaggregating various components of what usually get lumped together as “gender” (but NOT sex, which is an important distinction I will return to later). This is meant to show people that gender is actually a lot more complicated than they might think, and by disaggregating these various gendered components, you can demonstrate how LGBTQ+ people ‘fit into’ these components. 

I think it’s also important to talk about the visual tradition these diagrams are drawing from, which are anatomical diagrams of the human body shown to children and students for the purposes of teaching them about the human body. These “gender diagrams” metaphorise the concept of ‘anatomy’ by superimposing non-anatomical traits onto various organs of an abstracted human form (bear/unicorn/gingerbread). The fact that they are animals or baked goods as opposed to human bodies is very important in their visual language - they are necessarily metaphorical. This ‘anatomy of gender’ is a social anatomy.

So what’s the problem with doing this? I don’t think there’s any inherent problem with this - for example, trans people often have to explain that sex is an assemblage of traits that are not binary, mutually exclusive, or immutable. You could make a “sex trait unicorn” to show that sex isn’t ‘just’ genes or gametes or sexual organs or reproductive capacity or physical traits or birth certificates or etc, and I think that would probably be fine. But these specific diagrams are, perhaps contrary to their purpose, reaffirming this sex/gender aggregation through disaggregating them.

So, getting to the structural critique, I think the biggest theoretical problem with these diagrams are their ‘organ-ness’ - the heart is where sexuality is contained, the head is where identity is contained, and the… chromosomes between your legs are where sex is contained. It visually communicates that bodily organs are distinct containers for gendered/sexed traits. There are several problems with this, so let’s go organ by organ:

(this is getting long so I'm putting the rest under a cut)

This claim appears to be accurate. From the website "Generative AI For Good":

Notice how after Israel "(October 7th)" is specified. It's clear the CEO is not talking about victims of Israel.

Here is who they are working with currently:

Also preserved in our archive

At minimum about 4.5 thousand people liked this without reblogging it.

This is a comment that I and many of my fellow racial justice commentators have made when truly horrible things happen, just as they were intended to... Although the phrase may seem alarmingly coldhearted, it is our way of reminding ourselves that the greatest evil we face is not ignorant individuals but our oppressive systems. It is a reminder that the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Sandra Bland are not isolated cases. It is a reminder to refuse to let our shock and outrage distract us into thinking that these incidents do not all stem from the same root source, which must be dismantled. That source is white male supremacy.

White men lead our ineffective government with almost guaranteed reelection. They lead our corrupt and violent criminal justice system with little risk of facing justice themselves. And they run our increasingly polarized and misinforming media, winning awards for perpetrating the idea that things run best when white men are in charge. This is not a stroke of white male luck; this is how our white male supremacist systems have been designed to work.

And when I say "white supremacy", I'm not just talking about Klan members and neo-Nazis. Blatant racial terrorists- while deadly and horrifying- have never been the primary threat to people of color in America. It's more insidious than that. I am talking about the ways our schoolrooms, politics, popular culture, boardrooms, and more all prioritize the white race over other races. Ours is a society where white culture is normalized and universlized, while cultures of color or demonized, exotified, or erased."

cheese sits on the toilet while we take showers, and i like to stand on my tip toes and draw his silhouette in the steam from a high angle, then stand back to see how warped it is from his actual shape

Hassan Abu Riyala, undersecretary of the Ministry of National Economy in Gaza stated that Israel is “engineering a policy of starvation."

Supplies are Blocked. Israel shut down entry points, bottlenecking all limited traffic exclusively through Karem Abu Salem, and weaponize logistics to restrict aid by sending partially empty trucks.

Food Prices Surge. Israel has dismantled civil regulatory bodies by assassinating officials and targeting crews that monitor prices, enabling unaccountable price gouging.

Food Production Plummets. Only 14% of fuel trucks promised have made it into Gaza, impeding food production.

Jobs Destroyed. Over 160,000 jobs across industrial, agricultural, and commercial sectors have been destroyed, leaving 80% of the population with no income to buy food even when it is available.

This is the situation faced by my friend Mahrah (@mahrahpalestine) and her family in Gaza. Mahrah was an engineering student, and her brother Mahmoud owned a commercial store, which was their family’s main source of income. Israel destroyed his store, and Mahmoud is separated from them across Rafah Crossing.

Now their family's sole source of income is the fundraiser vetted by @90-ghost, shared by fairuzfan, and hosted by my wife @cannilyuncanny. Mahmoud told me that everything has increased in price by more than ten times what it was before the war.

Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.

Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.

And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?