If your advocacy for Black people stops at Black queer people your allyship is conditional. If your advocacy for Black queer people stops at Black trans fems, your allyship is conditional. If your advocacy for Black people has terms and conditions you have unchecked racist beliefs to unlearn and combat within yourself. That is something you desperately need to address in order to be a genuine ally to the most vulnerable demographics of Black people within our community.

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.

especially when they are fat. especially when they are Black or Native or Asian or any racial/ethnic group that isn't white. especially when they are tall and broad and have a deep voice and a beard, and especially when they like themselves that way and still are hurt by misgendering. especially when they have gone on E and T blockers and have gotten facial feminization and vaginoplasty and have DD tits and like themselves that way and still are hurt by misgendering (even when people think they should be grateful for it, even when it feels like the lesser of two evils). especially when they transition in ways people see as "only halfway" and dress androgynous and use contradictory labels and call themselves femboys in the same breathe they do tgirls and they like themselves clockable as fuck and still are hurt by transphobia and exorsexism.

Gender is constructed, yes, but there are some things that are indeed mutually exclusive. From a class perspective, a trans woman cannot be a gay man. Man and woman are, at the same time, totally-constructed, mutually exclusive categories AND (!) material realities that exist. The class conditions of men and women are different, because women face structural misogyny, and men do not. People split the lines of these two classes all the time, but this doesn’t mean these two, specific, mutually exclusice classes don’t exist.

While the classes of woman and man as well as their class interests (the destruction or the continuation of misogyny, respectively) are real, the concepts themselves of man and woman don’t map neatly onto reality, and this absurd imposition of fiction onto reality creates massive suffering, as does the real class structure this fiction supports. Just as there’s no innate, permanent, immutable, and solid difference between a capitalist and a worker, there’s no such difference between men and women. This is the ground reality below the infrastructure, below the structure, and below the superstructures of society. Those structures also have no innate, permanent, immutable, or solid existence. But the experiences that people have from them are just as real as anything else. These structures and categories are constantly shaped and reshaped by the actions of society. People move between the gender classes all the time. Pointing out the absurd difference between how people are treated as classes by saying oxymoronic identities like “gay man who is a trans woman” can help reduce their power, trying to get rid of class labels altogether won’t undo the conflicts between classes. It just makes it harder to see what’s going on while those class conflicts happen out of sight if nobody can talk about it.

I am one of the women you were talking about in this post, the fat trans woman who has facial hair, and a trans woman who tried being a gay boy. I seriously identified as a girlfag for years. I stopped, though, when I saw that I lost access to my gay male life completely once I transitioned past a certain point. The moment that I was seen as a woman, trans or cis, by gay men, I was an outsider to them. Sometimes there are gay men who see me as a man. They are a little more warm to me, but only when they can fuck me. Which I don’t like doing bc they think i’m a dude and it feels terrible for me ewwwwww.

But can you see where I’m coming from? I’m just one girl, but I think that adopting the framework of real class interests/constructed gender could contribute to the liberation of women and therefore the complete freedom to move between categories. Also, I think this is important enough to write a response to a stranger because this very conversation could change how some trans women are treated. The treatment we got as “gay men who identify as women” was something we fought to change, and I don’t want to see that clock turned back.

I just fundamentally disagree on pretty much every level that how people should identify needs to be exclusively grounded in their material class position (as decided by The Council, I suppose, because clearly they have no say in the matter). Again, I see no real difference between what you have said here and the well-formed, earnest, rational arguments made by many transphobic feminists as to why they may sympathize with trans women but fundamentally disagree on a materialist basis that they should be allowed to call themselves women given the perceived danger of making it harder to discuss the class differences between females and males. Its the exact same line of thinking.

I am sorry you had those experiences while identifying that way. You are correct that you are one girl, and your experiences and feelings are one individual's experiences and feelings, and what you have said is not all that convincing to me. You seem to be engaging with the idea of "a trans woman who is a gay man" on a largely theoretical, ideological basis, which is, again, always bad for all trans people. Using your personal experiences and feelings as proof to back up your theorization does not make it more grounded in the material reality of many people, including people who identify as trans women and gay men and do not feel the way you feel and do not interpret their experiences with transphobia & othering in gay men's spaces the way you do.

Men do face structural misogyny. Trans men exist. And trans women who also identify as men exist. I myself am multigender and am both a man and a woman, although given what you've written here, I can only imagine you feel that identity is impossible or harmful in some way because it is not binary and "materialist" enough in your eyes. But frankly, there is no way to be anything other than hostile to nonbinary people given the very limited version of trans materialism you've described here. Clinging so hard to the gender binary & basing your materialist analysis, not on many people's material experiences but on theoreticals and your personal feelings and experience, is harmful to other trans people.

If you are curious, my pinned post has a lot of links regarding the kind of transfeminism I engage with, although much of that is focused on anti-transmasculinity. To quote Emi Koyama, author of the Transfeminist Manifesto:

Cis feminists do not own feminism. We don't need to "fit trans people into feminist theory"; we simply need to challenge cissexism in feminist movements and theories. Trans people do not need to be explained by feminist theory; we need to start from the fact that trans people exist and matter.

Stranger Danger from an 80s - 90s kid who lived it

We talked to strangers. We talked to a LOT of strangers. We just knew how to do it safely.

"Don't talk to strangers" was not about never talking to people you didn't know. It was largely about sussing out appropriate help. For instance when I was little, I was always told that if I got lost in a store, I should go to the front of the store, find the checkout counter or customer service desk and ask for help, NOT just walk up to some random person in the store. When I was older I was taught that if I felt unsafe while walking alone I should duck into a store and ask the employees there to call my mom (remember, no cell phones).

I was taught to be very wary of someone randomly coming up to me to offer food or gifts andnot to get in a car with someone I didn't know who offered a ride, which if you think about it if you've ever been in a major city is a good way to avoid a lot of scams, not just kidnapping. It helped me at various points in my childhood learn to avoid religious missionaries on the street (no, I do NOT want that Watchtower, no, I do NOT want to come into your church, thanks). I was also taught not to open the door of our apartment for strangers, which is again a good way to avoid religious proselytizers and salespeople, as well as anyone who possibly might be casing your home.

The idea was to a) have a plan to ask for help, b) develop some discernment on WHO to ask for help, c) have some awareness that every single person you met might not have your best interests at heart. All of those things are still really important to know. The phrase "I don't talk to strangers" was an easy way to convey "I don't know you and I do not have enough information to decide if you are someone I should talk to right now," not "every stranger is going to kidnap me."

Kids in the 1980s and 1990s when "stranger danger" was a thing had a hell of a lot more freedom to interact with strangers than kids now - many if not most of us went places alone, took mass transit alone, carried out errands, stayed out with our friends all day, were sometimes home alone, and knew how to handle that. A fair number of the friends I had in my childhood were other kids that I randomly started talking to at the park, or wandering my neighborhood - I talked to strangers and made friends, in other words.

That also translated to being online. There were a lot of message boards, forums and websites for various interests, and people could and did just show up there and start talking to others who shared those interests. Some friendships that have endured 20 years or longer for me started when we both were in a forum talking about a band we both liked, or a movie we'd seen. We talked to strangers. We talked to a LOT of strangers. We just knew how to do it safely.

Being anonymous online

"Oh, we used to know not to give out personal information online and now every site wants it!" is not a misguided "stranger danger save the kids from mean adults!" thing.

EVERYONE was told that. ADULTS were told that.

A lot of the desire for you to use your real name and personal information online is for marketing and database creation. They want to know your interests and online activity so they can develop a better marketing profile for you. Why the hell do you THINK every company now wants you to use their app and tie it to your phone number? That's all valuable, sellable data for data brokers and marketers. YOU are the commodity. That data is also now potentially being used for things like ICE.

Using your real name online has led to people being fired, being rejected from colleges, etc. for nothing more than, say, being photographed drinking beer at a party or identifying as LGBT+. It's been used to take away people's disability benefits because they posted a photo where they smiled (yes, literally, this has been used against people) or didn't "look sick." Yes, it has also been used to identify people on the other side, but there's a cost to that. When your entire life is public and you have no privacy, there's a cost.

There actually IS a higher level of risk disclosing personal information online than there is in person. In your personal life you're unlikely to have literally a million people calling you or showing up at your door to scream homophobic insults, for example. That shit can and does happen online because more people have access to you. Internet trolls are a thing, and we can't pretend they are not. Things like swatting happen. If you're under an anonymous name on a fan site, that likely will not translate to being targeted in real life. If you're using your real name, disclosing where you live, your school or employer and your daily schedule as you live stream, it's a hell of a lot more likely that will translate to people harassing you offline, and that's happened.

At the time we were being told to guard our personal information, there were a LOT of dedicated, moderated places for children and teens to gather online and interact with others. Geocities, a website where you could create a free little website for yourself, had a children's section. There were Club Penguin, Yahooligans, and a lot of other websites specifically for kids and teens.

There was also software like Net Nanny that parents could install on their home computers that blocked access to certain sites or keywords, meaning it WAS taken as parents' responsibility to keep their kids safe. At the same time, with things like cable television, you could block certain stations to prevent your kids from watching them.

People did talk about themselves. People had websites about themselves and their likes, they wrote about their day on Livejournal or reviews movies they liked on whatever website existed for that. They interacted. The difference was that every single thing they did, every single place they went, every financial transaction, was not posted for the world.

Yes, you read that right. Fun fact: when you have too much testosterone in your system, your body converts it to estrogen! Why can trans men take testosterone without getting feminizing effects? Well, that’s because trans ftm hrt is specifically formulated to be slow-release, ie. the absolute opposite of what you want for illegal sports doping, and therefore the opposite of every steroid you can buy for that purpose. Sports doping is optimized to get into your system, do its thing while you are actively working out, and then be gone without a trace before your next blood test. If you tried to use the drugs that people dope with to maintain continuously high T levels, you would need to dose and re-dose constantly, and in doing so you would destroy your liver, and would also probably end up functionally taking estrogen as your body furiously converted as much of it as possible.

that being said. can we not erase the fact the entire conversation began with disabled people talking about being medically abused pretty please. & also, iirc the post that first really blew up about "mean girl nurses" never said "ALL nurses are evil bitches who hate everyone and they deserve to be mistreated" it was saying "women who sought power over other people in high school go into careers where they can wield power over other people, same as men, and there are women who go into nursing and present themselves as kind and caring and maternal, who are motivated by a desire to have unquestioned authority over other people's bodies to make themselves feel powerful, again, same as men who do the same things in masculinized careers." & i just find it "interesting" how all that has been reduced down to "all nurses are mean girls")

i think nuance is always important & doctors and nurses do need better treatment and society frequently praises them while also supporting their abuse. and yet they are also universally recognized as vital important members of society & empowered to have immense control over the lives of people who are systemically vulnerable and seen as leeches who add nothing to society. and yet who has to deal with the impacts of their stress and their trauma and their anger and their burnout? the disabled people under their care.

again. Nuance! but i just cannot help but Side Eye In Cripple some things people say on this topic. it can both be true that nurses (& doctors) experience horrible working conditions and that, in my opinion, that any conversation about burnout and abuse of medical professionals needs to also criticize the authoritarianism of the medical field and how widespread medical neglect and abuse is, lest we simply fall back into "the poor beleagured doctor who is Jesus Christ On The Cross Himself, all-wise and all-knowing and forced to tolerate all these entitled know-it-all ungrateful patients!" which changes nothing for anyone.

like. look at this article. the actual context for the "mean girl to nurse pipeline" (that some women seek out power over people to control them and make themselves feel bigger, and women are likely to do this through caretaking in the role of nurse, teacher, mother, etc.) is not brought up at all. the fixation is entirely on "its mean to call nurses mean girls! they experience a lot of bullying! you don't REALLY know any mean nurses, just poor tired bullied ones!"

First, the phrase itself is unfair to women. Although nursing is a female-dominated field, this phrase focuses on women as being the “mean” ones to worry about.

like. do youuuu fucking see the erasure of medical abuse. the actual bullshit nurses do to real living human beings, which goes massively under-reported. & not just disabled people but people of color as well. god fucking forbid medical professionals are treated as anything but literal saints descended from heaven. god forbid white cisgender women are recognized to have the ability to be cruel and power-hungry and to hurt other people through traditionally feminine roles based on caretaking. like I genuinely do understand that nurses are subject to immense stress, bullying, and violence, and that providing better working conditions for nurses is vital to improving medical treatment for all patients.

but when the actual neglect and abuse nurses can do to their patients is ignored and drops out of the conversation entirely, in the name of complaining about nurses being called "mean"? sorry but it pisses me the fuck off.

(links to some sources on patient abuse under the cut since this is long enough as is)