Welcome to my Twisted Blog

Three current and former detainees who spoke to the Guardian said that, between 2023 and 2025, they endured months of abuse from an assistant warden named Manuel Reyes and his associates. In their complaints to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the detainees also said that they faced retaliation for reporting the abuse to authorities, alleging that Reyes and other staff beat them and denied them medical treatment. “I was treated worse than an animal,” said Mario Garcia-Valenzuela, one of the detainees. “We don’t deserve to be treated like this.” Garcia-Valenzuela, a trans man detained at SLIPC, has alleged that, as part of the unsanctioned work program, Reyes forced him to move heavy cabinets and cinder blocks, and to clean using industrial-strength chemicals without gloves or protective gear. When Garcia-Valenzuela complained of injuries from the work program, he said, Reyes and his associates forcefully stripped him naked and mocked him. Kenia Campos-Flores, who is trans and non-binary, told the Guardian that they suffered from persistent migraines and chest pain after exposure to cleaning chemicals they were made to use during unofficial, overnight work shifts. Campos-Flores also alleged in a complaint they were persistently sexually harassed by Reyes, who entered their dorm and stole possessions including their boxers. Another trans detainee, Monica Renteria-Gonzalez, complained that a stripper chemical he was told to use to clean the facility floors seeped through his fabric shoes and burned the skin of his feet. On more than one occasion, while Renteria-Gonzalez was bent over cleaning, he said, Reyes came up from behind and inappropriately touched him. The assistant warden also told Renteria-Gonzalez he was watching the detainee through security cameras, including while he was showering. A fourth detainee, identified by the pseudonym Jane Doe, is a cisgender, queer woman who said that Reyes forced her to perform oral sex on him on a “near daily basis” between February and May 2024, threatening to kill her if she refused, according to her complaint. [...] “This was a sadistic late-night work program,” said Sarah Decker, a senior staff attorney with RFK Human Rights. “It was designed to target vulnerable trans men or masculine-presenting LGBTQ people, who [Reyes] coerced into participating.” [...] Garcia-Valenzuela had fled to the US in 2014 from Mexico, where he was tortured by members of a drug cartel. “I have no choice, that’s why I’m fighting,” he said. “Because I know that as soon as they deport me, I’m going to be handed over to the cartels and I’m going to be tortured and killed – ripped into pieces.” But in SLIPC he faced a new kind of horror. He alleged that on more than one occasion he was told to move heavy metal filing cabinets back and forth across a room. When he struggled to lift the furniture, Reyes would taunt him, he said, saying: “If you think you are a man, I’m going to treat you like a man.”

And no one in the community seems to be interested in bringing it the fuck up. Even a post which starts off by talking about forced detransitioning under ICE! You'd think this would be the perfect example of this kind of violence in action, but for some reason people don't seem to think these people make good enough victims for the cause. Why is that?

At a time where reproductive rights are also being drained away, where there is very clear targeting of people's ability to control if they are pregnant, is it really so much to ask that we don't start talking about trans men's ability to "financially and socially defend themselves" as if that means jack shit to the brown undocumented trans men being used as slaves and sexually assaulted by federal employees specifically because they are trans men.

"Focus their energies on protecting the most vulnerable" the majority of people I see who talk about reproductive justice forget trans men. The majority of people I see talk about 99% of social issues forget trans men, much less nonbinary people in general. When exactly are we allowed to focus our energies a population that has a 51% lifetime rate of sexual assault across races, and which goes up to 71% for Native trans men? A population that, no matter what study you look at, is paid less than cis women (also see here)?

"Relatively privileged"? Are you fucking kidding me? Do you have any idea how insanely hurtful and straight up misinformative that is to say, in these circumstances?

The callousness this shows towards trans men is just unconscionable, and is highly suggestive of a lack of knowledge about the violence trans men face as well as a lack of openness to questioning ingrained ideas about transmasculine people. I don't mean this as an attack but this is a very clear example of how people internalize transmasculine erasure and repeat it uncritically as fact. We cannot tolerate this rhetoric. I'd like to once again highlight this HRW report, specifically the section “"Butches Get Punched”: Violence Against Masculine-Presenting LBQ+ People” in “This Is Why We Become Activists”:

"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 [...] While gender expression is thus less explicitly criminalized than sexual orientation—the same project reports 66 countries that criminalize same-sex relations between consenting adults —LBQ+ people interviewed for this report repeatedly named gendered discrimination against masculine gender expressions[238] in particular as the catalyst for a lifetime of economic marginalization, discrimination and harassment at work, psychological abuse, and physical and sexual violence. Their accounts point to the need for deeper research and analysis of how masculine gender expression by LBQ+ people increases their risk of exposure to various human rights violations and abuses. Some reports on violence against LBQ+ people (explored below) have treated gender expression as a signifier of sexual orientation or gender identity, limiting knowledge production on how presentations of masculinity are themselves policed and violated.

This kind of attitude gets trans men is exactly what is described by this report as "limiting knowledge production on how presentations of masculinity are themselves policed and violated." It's just not right and its not remotely accurate. It can and does get trans men detransitioned and killed, and then those victims ignored and forgotten by the very people who claim to be acting purely out of a desire to focus on the most affected. The insistence that trans men don't need specific, focused attention and concern is exactly what creates the circumstances for their vulnerability!

I saw it was a tie between tenna and senshi and i cant help making this

seeing stuff like this is so upsetting because these terms were well known and widespread in the ace community but because of exclusionists many people stopped using terms like this because they felt uncomfortable and unsafe.

i loved these terms when i was in highschool, i loved the feeling of community, but i lost that because i didn’t feel comfortable openly and proudly calling myself asexual.

the thing is i'm not talking about the individual level of "sometimes trans men act like jerks"

i mean saying shit like "the legal system is designed by and for men." structural systemic examples of androcentrism and misogyny that trans men objectively were not privileged in considering, and in fact are actively fucked over just as much if not more than cis women. there is no excuse for not saying "cis men" here (& as people pointed out in the notes, there's also a lot of other ways in which various marginalized men are excluded, but even just focusing on gender/sex as a lens here).

its not even about individuals internalizing toxic masculinity. and its also not even about individuals who just individually don't care about trans men! i am not making a point about how individuals think here really. the point is that across the spectrum of political ideology and feminist identification and genuine trans allyship, people consistently. CONSISTENTLY. will overlook using a three letter word to clarify that they understand trans men are not cis men and that the "men" privileged on a systemic level under patriarchy are cis men, even when its a situation which would genuinely be absurd to think trans men were considered or valued.

Normally I'm all for more interpretations than defaulting to the binary, but in this case, Lady Macbeth's yearning/rage is specifically and overwhelmingly tied to ideas around being a man. "Unsex me now" in the context of the play and Lady Macbeth's circumstances and preoccupations is about her choosing a path that's going to strip her of the sex that has determined the course of her life—that is, womanhood; she's calling for the sex she already has (as understood in her world) to be taken away so she can be a true man—the man that Macbeth is not. Lady Macbeth's whole deal is caught up in regarding Macbeth as less of a man than she is, yet reaping the rewards of it despite his failures of masculinity.

Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.

Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between

Th’ effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts

And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,

Wherever in your sightless substances

You wait on nature’s mischief. 

"Unsex me" is cast as being emptied, twice ("come to my woman's breasts/and take my milk"), and immediately connected to being refilled with something ("cruelty," "gall"). It's not about emptiness; it's about replacing what makes her a woman with something else.

What might that something else be? Well, we get a clue when she tells Macbeth later "when you durst do it, then you were a man."

The contrast here is that mercy, compunction, pity, remorse are cast as womanly--and cruelty, gall, murder as manly.