Back on my āeveryone who talks about social justice theory should learn at least the basics of the disability justice framework and how interconnected ableism is with racism because then maybe people would realize that intersectional analysis means we canāt be doing this ābut this is ājustā x oppressionāā soap box.
Yāall. When Black Panthers were institutionalized for supposed mental illness and chemically restrained and sometimes permanently disabled because institutionalizing them meant they could be locked up forever instead of getting a fair trail was that ājustā racism or ājustā ableism?
When Black kids get diagnosed with Oppositional Defiance Disorder and any of their complaints or self-advocacy is dismissed as ādefianceā and they get the police called on them for being kids is that ājustā racism or ājustā ableism?
When systemic racism disables racialized people and then systemic racism makes it harder for them to access medical care and disability supports is that ājustā racism or ājustā just ableism?
When ICE specifically targets racialized people and then denies people access to their life-sustaining medications or denies people theyāve injured access to necessary medical care and that kills people is that ājustā racism or ājustā ableism?
When police officers kill disabled people of color for being āunpredictableā or āout of controlā or āhaving a weaponā (it doesnāt matter if it was just a butter knife) or for not responding immediately to their instructions (they were deaf and facing the other way) is that ājustā racism of ājustā ableism?
When racialized person donāt get a job because their cultural dialect or their accent is seen as a lack of intelligence is that ājustā racism or ājustā ableism?
When Black wheelchair users are assumed to be disabled because they were a gang member, whether or not thatās correct, but either way are denied access to resources they need is that ājustā racism or ājustā ableism?
When Black people are labeled ādrug seekingā and left to suffer horrible pain is that ājustā racism or ājustā ableism?
When police officers approach a Black mother trying to help her young child through an autistic meltdown, forcing her to have to deal with convincing them sheās not abusive and have to work even harder to help her kid because they can tell somethingās wrong, is that ājustā racism or ājustā ableism?
When Black and brown people join gangs because of systemic racism and are shot in the spine before or during their arrest and once theyāre out of jail canāt find an apartment because none of the wheelchair accessible apartments accept people with a criminal record so they have to live in a nursing home and then die because their city sent COVID patients to their nursing home when the hospitals ran out of beds and put people who had tested positive for COVID in the same rooms as them is that ājustā racism or ājustā ableism?
Youāll notice that some of these examples are about disabled people of color but some of them are not. Thatās because ableism can still affect people who are not disabled! And sometimes racism weaponizes ableism!
Racism can and does weaponize other types of oppression to oppress racialized people who would not be targeted by those types of oppression otherwise. It still counts as that other type of oppression!
There are a lot of reasons for this, but a big one is that none of the types of oppression that exist today were created in a vacuum. In fact, many of them only exist the way they do so that they could be weaponized against groups who are not usually thought of as the intended targets of that type of oppression.
And is the narrow definition of āproper Englishā actually racism, ableism, classism, xenophobia, or imperialism? Is the narrow definition or femininity or womanhood actually misogyny, transphobia, racism, classism, or imperialism? Or is it maybe all of them at once?
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cute little tie backs to the rest of the story (like with the last screenshot i posted) but what really kills me is miles just chilling watching the fireworks with pizza with spot all webbed up š
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happy pride month here is your assigned fag reading The Golden Handcuffs of Gay Rights: How Pinkwashing Distorts both LGBTIQ and Anti-Occupation Activism by Jasbir Puar for the Feminist Wire.
also if you want extra credit and are willing to read more check out Against Equality: Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion edited by Ryan Conrad as i will be checking this out too x (downloadable as an ePub here but consider supporting these works if possible)
hey itās pride month again. reject the manufactured joy of neoliberal inclusion. disrupt the narrative of western nations as queer safe havens. do not allow your life to be used to justify the death of others. repeat our histories of revolt and rebellion over and over until they can never say otherwise. be informed, precise, angry, and engaged.
despite it all, pride month again. abolition and international solidarity stand at the forefront of liberation. queer liberation can never come at the expense of another. never allow yourself to be the oppressor for gains measured only in blood.
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hey now that itās disability pride month can you please remember to include people with Down syndrome and other chromosomal defects into your activism. theyāre so often left behind. I literally never see anyone spreading Down syndrome awareness that isnāt close family of someone with Down syndrome. They exist and theyāre living breathing humans who deserve just as much activism as every other disabled person
The strange part is that America once had many seating laws for workers, but many were old laws written only for women and later disappeared or became weak. Today, places like California, Florida, Massachusetts, Montana, New Jersey, Oregon, and Wisconsin have broader āright to sitā protections.
Can we stop insisting a nonbinary character must be strictly transmasc or transfem? Especially if they have expressed zero interest in a masculine or feminine identity? For fuckās sake.
If you embroider or hand sew in your bed, you may think to yourself, "I'm just gonna set my needle down real quick next to me/on my chest/literally anywhere except inside the project or on a needle catcher and I'll get it in a minute, it'll be fine." But it won't be fine. You'll lose the needle and then you'll have a loose needle just in your bed. Haunting you. Waiting for you. Craving your flesh and blood.
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I do just gotta say that sometimes you look at yourself with body mods that you've wanted for ages and every single picture they're visible makes you smile.
I've had my industrial bar for 17 months now and I still love catching sight of it in every photograph or mirror. I've only wanted one since I was a teenager.
Kadji Amin joins Jules to talk the category nonbinary, the asymmetry of trans masculinity and trans femininity, and a shared love of f*gottr
I just found this and it's really bad
Wtf is this seriously.
Not only is this just an absolute circle jerk, but they view enben (in 2021 mind you) As a political statement, as something like oooh we're just shaking things up, we're so silly goofy.
Hey how about ask us?
This is the lady who goes to further her reactionary hatred of non binary people with her "transgender liberalism" article.
At least in 2021 they both treated us like some strange tropical bird they were studying. Now it's pure blame and hatred.
This is the kind of "scholars" that make me want to be more loudly mogai. Because the self is the point, you don't need anyone's external evaluation in order to be. I don't live my gender in relation to other people, it's not an act, it's just a static piece of info about me.
Also, "if everyone treated me like I was okay, I'd not transition" is a very strange argument to bring out. I don't think we should treat trans people harshly in hopes it'll push them to transition. That's fucked up.
Okay yeah I read this article and it sucks ass. Also this reblog got longer than anticipated to under a cut it goes.
They keep talking about nonbinary people in the abstract, and going like "ohh if only we could understand what nonbinary femmes think their identity means! Are they trying to figure out the boundary between being a gay man and being a trans woman??? What are their intentions???? If only we could know!" like. Jules. You know you are allowed to talk to nonbinary people right? And listen to their words? You don't have to speculate on them from your ivory transsexual tower, helpless to understand their strange and foreign minds.
Not to mention how they continually treat "nonbinary" as, seemingly, equivalent to non-transitioning, and draw a sharp distinction between "transsexuals" and "nonbinary people." They talk in this frustrating, masturbatory way about their many Intellectual Transsexual Questions for nonbinary people and just projecting all their exorsexist bullshit onto nonbinary people, and acting like its impossible for them to just ask a nonbinary person?
this whole paragraph:
Whenever I would think of genderqueer (the term in vogue in my twenties) and nonbinary as positions, I would imagine them as truly heroic. As naming people who are able to exist in a space where others donāt see who you know yourself to be, but you just donāt care. Your sense of yourself is so strong you donāt need to change your body to get other people to see you in a certain way; you just know that other people are wrong and that youāre right and thatās okay. And I thought I could never be strong enough to do that. In my life I had associated it with the most unbearable dysphoria, the most unbearable gap between how I was seeing myself and how other people were seeing me, especially once I had taken on the pronouns he/him but was trying to transition without testosterone.
So, I thought of nonbinary as this heroic position for a long time and then, more recently, Iāve begun to have doubts and think, well, maybe thatās not how it feels.Ā
LISTEN, KADJI. I DO NOT WANT TO BE YOUR NONBINARY HERO. I DO NOT WANT TO BE SEEN AS TRULY HEROIC.
They seem just. Obsessed, with this image of nonbinary people as "brave" for being visibly androgynous?
[J]: [...] But this is the problem because we donāt have an operative, positive account of whatās at stake in nonbinary trans femininity, so it gets filtered through these really superficial lenses. Like, āwell, they get treated like shit all the time, but theyāre really resolute, plus itās empowering to have facial hair and wear lipstick,ā and Iām like, yes, okay, but tell me more! I want to know.
Kadji:Ā Maybe my major question is why there isnāt more of a discourse about all of this? Even an intra-community discourse where questioning people could go online and hear āthis is what it means to identify with this as opposed to that, this is what you do.ā I donāt know if I should read that as a refusal orā
Jules:Ā Or just the impossibility of speaking outside a discourse of gender? Which in some ways, nonbinary is trying to do in a really sophisticated way, but which remains very hard. How can you simultaneously dissent from a system but still maintain its central presumption, which is that gender is a fundamentally important facet of the self? That seems like a really complex tangle that, technically, is not unique to being nonbinary. Even cis women have this problem to some extent, but thereās something really interesting in the nonbinary case that is not being unleashed.
How can we understand the phenomenologies attached to different trans identities of this moment and what their claims are on the relationship between the self and the social? It seems like the contemporary taxonomy of gender identity and expression suggests that every identity position is valid so long as it is articulated and can therefore be respected, and in that sense it becomes devoid of content. How do you give an account of yourself in this situation?
This just feels like "I don't get nonbinary people" soaked in fifty-three layers of academic language, all to avoid confronting the fact that nonbinary people are nonbinary in the same way a trans woman is a trans woman. They just cannot help but insist that nonbinary people are "heroic" and "trying to [speak outside the discourse of gender] in a really sophisticated way," like they are truly only able to conceptualize nonbinary identity as a political move and act helpless about their ability to talk to a nonbinary person and take what they say seriously without secretly re-interpreting it as whatever bullshit they want (such as "nonbinary people think they are soooooo much better than us binary people!" looking at you, Jules.)
More exorsexism:
But one of the things you and I have been trying to understand is whatās the historical trajectory here to nonbinary. For a long time, the line between a faggotāa really effeminate gay person, a queen, or even a drag queenāand a trans femme was blurry and there is a lot of cultural anxiety about that slide in Western culture. That you might go all the way, that it might be horrifying and abjecting, or it might be something like the total freedom of feminization or castration, or even bottomhood (to which I laugh, as a femme top). Itās this sort of construct of the gay imaginary. But it also leads to this question: since thereās so little space for nonbinary trans femmes today and thereās a lot of pressure on them to put out something legible, they have to use this taxonomy of āoh, Iām not a man or woman, but Iām definitely not a manāāand then what? Iām always searching for the positive account that comes after āhere is what Iām not,ā and Iād like to see more cultural space granted to that. If youāre a nobinary trans femme that has a largely aesthetic component to your transitionāsay, makeup, clothes, and pronounsāwhat is it that differentiates you positively from the faggot as a gay boy or feminine person who is not a man?
I want to underline that there has been precious little oxygen accorded to that, so this is not a criticism of any of these people. Not enough has been granted to them to affirm their desires. And since there is so much pressure in our contemporary taxonomy to separate gender from sexuality, it seems to make the situation even more impossible.
I am just. so confused by her confusion here? Once again, Jules, JUST TALK TO NONBINARY FEMMES ABOUT THIS??????? Why in the WORLD are you having this conversation with a binary trans man. What purpose does this serve except jerking each other off on how much nonbinary people confuse you and seem to have no phenomenological basis for their existence.
[Kadji]: So, I thought, okay, gay male culture has done its best to kill the possibility of faggotry, but here are nonbinary femmes bravely trying to resuscitate it as a living possibility rather than a site of abjection. But as time has gone by, Iāve started to wonder if maybe thatās not what theyāre doing, and itās still unclear to me because of the lack of a space for that kind of discourse, or a refusal to explain themselves in that kind of way. Iām quite surprised, given the amount of space that was devoted in the late 1990s to early 2000s to figuring out the butch/trans man proximity, that thereās still a vacuum for that kind of discourse on the other side. How do you know if youāre a gay man or a trans woman? How do you know if youāre a trans woman or a nonbinary femme? This contributes to my lack of understanding of what a phenomenological position for nonbinary femme might be.
Again, I donāt know if thatās what any nonbinary femmes are trying to do, but if thatĀ isĀ what some are trying to do, Iām not sure itās working. As in, Iām not sure that enough people know how to read or respond accordingly to a trans femininity that isnāt either gay effeminacy or trans womanhood.
WHO GIVES A FUCK IF PEOPLE KNOW HOW TO RESPOND TO US. for a lot of nonbinary people its live illegibly but openly or be in the closet forever and want to kill yourself because there is no space for you. I hate to pull the "we have dysphoria" card, but like, WE DO HAVE DYSPHORIA TOO, YOU KNOW? for a lot of nonbinary femmes there is no fucking "project" other than living a life that makes you feel real despite never being given any social reality. They go on to talk about how butches apparently have more cultural legibility, but I do not understand why the "faggot" or femboy or drag queen is not seen as a nonbinary femme equivalent? There is plenty of hostility from cis woman butches towards nonbinary and transmasculine butches. I guess the point is that all of those rely upon the assumption of attraction to men.... but so does butch, and there are gay transmascs who still identify as butch, butch4butch (which for some was a way of being a gay trans men when the option did not seem available) has always been treated negatively, and once again. Why is nonbinary identity being judged around people can get what we are by looking at us?
& then there's the same old bullshit about how transmascs have always had more cultural space and "reasons to transition" (what?), alongside a quote in which she says "and who the fuck in this world is allowed to desire to be a woman?" tell me you know nothing about how misogyny works. People raised as women are expected to desire to be a woman, obligated to do so. I do not know why the fuck people cannot get it in their heads that yes, womanhood is treated as a lesser state of existence, but for those who are expected to fulfill the role of daughtermotherwife, that lesser state is what they are meant to be happy with. They also claim there is "so much more cultural space for mascs, including nonbinary, and thereās so much more history (for butches and non-binary mascs)." Which. Fucking. Where.
ultimately, i think this final part of this interview hits more clearly on what issue they are taking with nonbinary people:
[Kadji] This is a hypothesis, but I do think todayās taxonomies seem more confusing than everāthough perhaps that doesnāt feel true to people who are coming into their genders today. But I believe that they are more confusing than they are helpful to actual queer and trans people. [...]
And so, I imagine that today, when there is a huge proliferation of options and the options often overlap or are synonymous without substantial phenomenological accounts to differentiate them, and the pressure to come into a true self has never been greater than it used to beāit seems just flabbergasting and impossible.
What Iāve realized is that I believe that the matter of gender is practical and relational. Itās not about who you are inside, itās more about how you would feel most comfortable in the world. Itās not Who are you? but How do you want to live?Ā
Had that been the discourse when I was coming up, I would have breathed a sigh of relief. I donāt have to figure out who I am on the inside, I just have to figure out how I want to live.
look, i'm a pragmatist and a phenomonologist, i also see gender as being to some degree inherently practical and relational. but as a nonbinary person, i do not have the luxury of living the way that makes me feel fucking comfortable. my feelings of being nonbinary are not abstract, they materially impact me. nonbinary identity is about survival, to me, point blank period. survival comes first, survival is where the term nonbinary/genderqueer/whatever terms we use emerges because it emerges from us no longer being able to live without giving voice to our sense of otherness.
demanding nonbinary provide a phenomenological account that satisfies binary "transsexuals" who define their transsexuality opposed to nonbinary people, using the language of "gender is practical and relational, not who you are inside," maybe i'm being dramatic here when i say this, but its a threat to nonbinary survival. patriarchy makes us illegible and then we are punished i mean critiqued i mean "we're just asking questions!!" for not being legible. because we practice, in Jules' words, "nonbinary idealism" and are all rich white people who are just doing this to be heroic and make ourselves look more #woke than binary transsexuals.
anyways, shoutout to one of the people in the comments who said:
you two talk as though non-binary femmes (heroically, but also for fun) put on some makeup and change their pronouns and thereby become illegible. for my part, i have always felt illegible (how is that for a phenomenology of non-binary gender).
most of the answers to your questions here are in your own the text if you begin from the assumption that non-binary people have a genuine experience of their gender as neither men nor women.
^ literally exactly the point. Jules and Kadji are exorsexist and fundamentally do not seem to grasp the idea that nonbinary people feel nonbinary and that feeling nonbinary has a real impact on your life regardless of whether you want it to or not. They literally cannot, or refuse to, see nonbinary gender as functioning the same as their genders, and so treat nonbinary people like a peculiar species of not-quite-trans with mysterious motivations, and not just like normal fucking trans people.
All in all, as a nonbinary transsexual, everything JGP says about nonbinary people makes me feel like I am going fucking crazy.
It feels like Jules doesn't even talk to trans women who aren't strongly tied to cis gay culture that much, so a lot of this reads as "but how do non-binary transfems fit into cis gay culture?" Like, "For a long time, the line between a faggotāa really effeminate gay person, a queen, or even a drag queenāand a trans femme was blurry and there is a lot of cultural anxiety about that slide in Western culture." And then Kadji saying: "So, I thought, okay, gay male culture has done its best to kill the possibility of faggotry, but here are nonbinary femmes bravely trying to resuscitate it as a living possibility rather than a site of abjection."
And, like, speaking for myself (as an agender trans woman), I just don't occupy a space in cis gay culture. So yeah they're going to have trouble fitting me in there. IDK this feels like high school when peers called me a faggot and thought I must be a cis gay boy because I was obviously queer and that was the only kind of queer they could think of. But I'm ace and I'm not a man and I'm not into feminine gender expression. I am definitely not a gay man being extra faggy about it. My relationship to the culture of gay men is that of an outsider with a history of people incorrectly thinking I'm one of y'all.
And in terms of internal identity vs. relational identity, my internal identity is "agender" and my relational identity is "trans woman". Reading through those bits from their conversation, I think I'm not even on their radar enough that it's occurred to them to interrogate my positionality or whatever. I'm not "brave" or trying to make a statement or primarily interested in the aesthetics or anything like that. In society I hope people read me as a woman who isn't into feminine gender expression, because that's a reasonably comfortable and reasonably socially accepted thing to be. I don't put the non-binary aspects of my identity front-and-center in my interactions with people because I don't want the hassle. It doesn't feel good.
Anyways yeah they should both talk to more transfems. Sure, there are trans women and other transfems who are strongly associated with the culture of cis gay men. But if that's kind of the entire landscape they can imagine for transfemininity they gotta get out of their bubble every now and then.
The entire thing is based on the premise that nonbinary people are really part of the gender binary and just putting on an act to try and make a statement, which is made all the more absurd with how frequently they both admit they can't figure out what that statement is supposed to be.
"What are nonbinary people trying to do?" survive, mainly. Just be myself and survive. I'm not nonbinary because I'm trying to make a statement or be empowering or shit I'm just living my fucking life.
yeah, exactly. They genuinely can not imagine gender outside of the binary so hard that they have to twist themselves into knots trying to understand us, when they could literally just ask. They don't want to understand, because that doesn't get them attention and money or whatever reason they do this for
