The news won't say the word INFANT, but I will. Kohen Kartier Wiley was 1 year old.

KOHEN KARTIER WILEY WAS ONE YEAR OLD. HE WAS A GOD DAMN BABY! AND THE POLICE KNEW!

The following is from Mississippi Free Press (links preserved; emphasis mine):

The Mississippi Department of Public Safety released a statement on June 14, alleging that the shooting happened in response to one of two subjects driving “in the direction of” officers. A clip of cellphone video obtained by Fox 13 Memphis shows a car driving away from officers, but it does not appear to show the shooting itself. A photo of the car shows multiple bullet holes in the windshield, including a bullet hole on the passenger side of the front windshield.

Notably, the DPS statement appears to acknowledge that police witnessed the presence of Kohen Wiley prior to the individuals entering their vehicle, and before the officer discharged the weapon. The officer has not been identified.

“Law enforcement officers responded to a shoplifting call at Walmart on U.S. 51. Upon arrival, officers encountered two subjects and a juvenile child fleeing from the store into a vehicle. Officers attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one,” the statement read in part. “An officer then discharged their weapon and the vehicle fled the scene. The subjects arrived at a local hospital where one juvenile child in the vehicle was pronounced deceased, and another subject had critical injuries. No law enforcement officers received any serious physical injury.”

Members of Kohen Wiley’s family have denied that any shoplifting took place. WREG reported that, before the shooting, a witness saw two women exit the store: one carrying a single box of diapers, and one carrying the infant child. Family told WREG that Kohen’s mother was riding in the passenger seat holding the child when the officer shot him and that the aunt, who was driving, was in critical condition. Another witness told the news station that she saw the car driving away with police officers chasing after it on foot just before hearing gunshots. At present, no arrests have been announced in the incident.

“Senatobia Police Department get away with too much stuff,” WREGH reported Kohen’s great-grandmother Carolyn Stokes, as saying. “I hear about it all the time. It’s in the news all the time. Y’all probably down here all the time, recording this stuff, but it’s just too much.” Members of the community plan to gather at Senatobia City Hall at 5 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon to call for accountability for Kohen Wiley’s killing.

So let me get this right: It's legal to attempt to murder two Black women for bringing their child to the store for a diaper run. It's legal to attempt to murder two Black women for trying to flee your gestapo as you harass and threaten them for a crime they did not do.

unfortunately anon so, so many people have not actually agreed that. a lot of people have never heard the term oppositional sexism & i've even see some people on tumblr throwing it around & saying "transandrobros don't understand oppositional sexism" while engaging in oppositional sexism.

its also crazy because The Transfeminist Manifesto is pretty anti-oppositional sexism as Emi Koyama was capable of appreciating nuance. frankly i knowwww none of these fucking people have read the Manifesto, because Emi wrote an entire section on Male Privilege where she makes the explicit argument that trans women are capable of experiencing male privilege because anyone can, including a cis woman with a traditionally masculine name, and that trans women shouldn't downplay this since it isn't helpful to building solidarity and it allows cis women to argue they don't have cis privilege just because they are women and so the cisness cancels out.

and i fucking KNOW if someone posted that exact argument on here, plenty of the people who consider themselves the defenders of trve transfeminism on here would call it transmisogynistic and tear it apart. like.

idk man. isn't it kind of telling that so many people on here seem to think Julia Serano, a white American woman who while having her own nuanced and important contributions to transfeminism and feminism in general, also has a history of contributing to anti-transmasculine and exorsexist myths, is the founder of transfeminism.

meanwhile, the term transfeminism was first put in print by Patrick Califia, a trans man who wrote prominently as a pro-BDSM lesbian in 1997, and then in 2001 Emi Koyama, an intersex Japanese trans woman who also didn't consider herself to have a gender, critiqued white feminism for tokenizing women of color and ignoring racial analysis, critiqued perisex trans people for viewing gender as a construct but still believing the sex binary, critiqued "reverse essentialism" where trans people "adopt the essentialist notion of gender identity" because "essentializing our gender identity can be just as dangerous as resorting to biological essentialism," who i cannot stress this enough literally wrote this in the section on violence against women:

Trans men also live in the constant fear of discovery as they navigate in a society that persecutes men who step outside of their socially established roles. Crimes against trans men are committed by strangers as well as by close “friends,” and are undoubtedly motivated by a combination of transphobia and misogyny, performed as a punishment for violating gender norms in order to put them back in a "woman's place."

and STILL wrote a postscript saying a fundamental problem she saw with her manifesto was

"Overemphasis on male-to-female trans people at the expense of female-to-male trans people and others who identify as transgender or genderqueer. I take full blame for the fact that this manifesto is heavily focused on issues male-to-female transsexual people face, while neglecting unique struggles that female-to-male trans people and other transgender and genderqueer people face. At the time I wrote this piece, I felt the need to restrict the focus of feminism to “women” because I feared that expanding the focus would permit non-trans men to exploit feminism for their interest, as some so-called men’s rights groups do. While I still feel that this fear is justified, I now realize that privileging transsexual women’s issues at the expense of other trans and genderqueer people was a mistake. [...] I have thought about writing a new manifesto to address these and other insights I gained since 2000, with the confidence and clarity I have now, but for now I am leaving the task to others. If you write one, please send it to me.

& in 2008:

I wanted to write a feminist theory that counter the argument that transsexual women were so different from all other women that there is no place for transsexual women within feminism (or that feminism has no use for transsexual women). I wanted to provide easy-to-repeat arguments that pro-trans feminists can use to confront blatant bigotry and falsehoods against transsexual women. And to these ends, I think “Manifesto” was successful. But there was something unsettling about the “Manifesto.” In an effort to forge an alliance between transsexual and non-transsexual women, the piece neglected the struggles of transsexual men and other transgender or genderqueer people who do not identify as “women” unless it was convenient to include them. The piece was also weak on intersectional analysis–that is, how anti-trans sentiments and oppressions compound and complicate oppressions other than sexism, including and especially racism and classism. It borrowed from the work of women of color when it was useful–for example, to point out that transsexual women’s unique experiences should not be the basis for their exclusion because to do so would presuppose a singular universal female experience, which is obviously false–without contributing any insights as to how the inclusion of trans sensibility helps to fight racism and other oppressions. The fact is, I had only been living in my new home town for three months or so when I wrote this piece, and I was not fully in touch with my own discomfort with the white feminism that filled nine out of ten weeks of the Introduction to Women’s Studies, nor did I feel confident enough to challenge the view that feminism is simply about advocating for women and fighting sexism–and nothing more. In short, what I had written was a version of white feminism that was modified just enough to include transsexual women. At the time, I felt that it was the only safe way to write a feminist theory that advanced transsexual women’s place within feminism. I spent next couple of years meeting more people with a common commitment for justice for all, slowly building the self-confidence it takes to “transform silence into language and action,” as Audre famously stated.

(& i think there are good criticisms that can be made of the Manifesto, but that does not change my respect for it because she engaged in self-critique and wanted the work to be open to criticism, to be a beginning and not limit to active transfeminism theory and practice).

like. interesting how a lot of self-proclaimed transfeminists on here are outspokenly explicitly against the beliefs of both of the trans people who helped popularize the term. people have been pointing the problems with this shit out for 2 decades at this point & y'all think its just tumblr discourse.

ive worked in hospitals for a long time, and years ago i saw a patient very frequently. he came in once every month or so, inpatient. one day he told me what he kept coming in for. he had a knee replacement, but it kept rejecting. so the hospital would take it out, keep him, and then put it back in. he told me that he was fighting to just have it amputated. he said he was in his 70s and he just didnt have enough time anymore to spend it all in the hospital. he said that he felt he could live a better and more fulfilling life for the years he had left if they just took the leg off. he could get a prosthetic and just not have to go to the hospital all the time. he said that the doctors were fighting him on it but that was what he wanted. i said that i understood, and that i hoped he could get that amputation

anyway, some time passed, and i saw him again. i asked whats up, he was beaming and said, "i got it done! they took the leg off!" i was like, "hell yeah man, how are you feeling?" and he said "well it hurts right now but im not gonna have to come here all the time anymore." he left the hospital some time later, and i never saw him again, which is all you can hope for when you work in a hospital

he also had an elective surgery, a "voluntary" surgery. he chose to have an amputation because he was suffering with the limb intact. and thats really what we're doing too. yes, transition surgeries are elective, but that doesnt mean that theyre not necessary to improve the quality of our lives