free potato

Found my writing for that and it still holds up. I’ll caveat it by saying 1) this is specific to the Americas context (not just North, Maria Lugones is a South American feminist) 2) this is not rejecting feminism or women’s liberation but rather the female sexed subject as the basis for feminism:

My goal is to rethink transgender politics by placing it within the context of colonization. ‘Queer’ decolonization studies focuses on the colonial erasure of pre-colonial gendering and sexuality, with some arguing a non-existent pre-colonial gendering and sexuality within some contexts. In taking these critiques seriously we must ask the question of what transgender and feminist politics within colonized spaces means with an understanding of these politics as developing from a eurocentric framework.

To do this we must place Judith Butler and Monique Wittig in conversation with the tradition of Black and Indigenous Feminisms to better understand the role race plays in the construction of gender. A common Black Feminist critique of the Radical Feminist movement in addition to other Feminisms, is the unspoken assumption of the white sexually dimorphic body as universal female experience. Wittig spoke of the biological model for sex as part of the legacy of patriarchy naturalizing the social divisions between men and women when used by both gender science and feminism. The Combahee River Collective made a similar claim against radical feminism, coming from a racial lens, to describe biological essentialism as racialized and why they rejected it from the perspective of often not being considered to be ‘real women.’

We know from Judith Butler that there is no pre-discursive body, that to describe a body before discourse is to discursively construct it, and because of this biological sex is always already gender; the move towards essentializing sex is to discursively construct a category as pre-existing discourse. Gender is always already heterosexual, the symbolic categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ existing to naturalize divisions that exist to propagate itself through reproductive futurism that produces the gendered subject. But these gendered subjects, the assumption of universal whiteness by excluding the narrative of race from its conception, was always already racialized. Gender is a white nationalist politics that associates the purity of the nation with the reproduction of the white race and its subjects. This is a departure from the framework that there is a universal female experience based in the naturalism of sex. Instead, Maria Lugones’s framework of the Coloniality of Gender, or gender as part of the European colonization of the Americas and Africa is where we’ll base an analysis of gender from.

The Coloniality of Gender describes the arising Enlightenment project of scientific naturalism replacing the theological basis for race. In this process, scientific naturalism seeks to explain previous theological justifications for race within biological terms - naturalizing social divisions within the pre-discursive. Maria Lugones argues that gender is part of this process within Enlightenment thought.The biologizing of gender cannot be separated from the biologizing of race. The Coloniality of Gender describes the supposed universal dimorphic sexed body as white. By placing attention to the context where Black and Indigenous Feminists were describing their gendered experiences as racialized - that their womanhood is not a universal assumption but a contested space we can rethink gender politics as a racial politics. Coexisting with the assumption of the white sexed body as the universal female experience is the assumption of Blackness and Indigeneity as outside the symbolic integrity of gendered categories. The Coloniality of Gender is seen in the colonial encounter - the meeting space of the colonizer’s eurocentrism with the colonized subject. Maria Lugones describes this colonial encounter as not carrying forward the notion of a universal sexually dimorphic body. The colonial encounter instead produces racial subjects within what Lugones terms the ‘light’ and ‘dark’ side of gender. The dark side of gender is seen in the colonial literature describing Black and Indigenous persons as non-normatively sexed, as intersexed, disfigured, mutilated, excessive, as not dimorphic but rather masculine and feminine in ways unintelligible in the face of the model of sexual dimorphism as white.

Hortense Spillers further problematizes the notion of a universal white sexed body by arguing that the violence of the Middle Passage and enslavement is an ungendering violence, and making visible that violence into the flesh. Her distinction between body and flesh is essential to an understanding of gender as racialized. Black Flesh being ungendered further proves the white sexed body is not universal. Black persons existing outside of the Enlightenment Humanist discourses shows us that the body belongs to the human while Black Flesh does not belong to the human. The flesh can never be part of the light side of gender, as dimorphic or heterosexual.This historical narrative of gender as racialized confirms much of what Black and Indigenous Feminism have already described starting with “Ain’t I A Woman?” Gender politics being based within accepting the narrative of the Coloniality of Gender answers this question for us: No. Sex is the naturalization of white supremacist racial politics, not existing within the body before discourse, and sex relying on the separation between the liberated subject position of the body versus the ungendering of the captured flesh.

'Transfem DIY HRT' and 'Transmasc DIY HRT' are a pair of zines aimed at teaching transgender people how to safely self-administer DIY Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT).

Both zines are 100% free to download here from Little Mouse (who also made the zine). Print, share and distribute to those who need it!

Hundreds gathered in San Francisco’s Chinatown as city leaders and community members celebrated the opening of the world’s first Chinese LGBTQ museum. Mayor Daniel Lurie joined supporters for the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the OUT Museum, a space dedicated to preserving and sharing Chinese queer history and culture. The museum was founded by Chinese artist and LGBTQ advocate Xiangqi Chen, who spent more than 20 years promoting queer visibility in China before moving to the United States in 2023.

an amv of just machines and cute girls from 80s/90s anime, set to fun music

(youtube link)

yup, and she's very proud of it

Do you want bottom surgery in the future? Want to make sure you can't have babies? Masculinize a bit faster? Just curious about HRT after a hysterectomy? Do I have the zine for you! This zine is based on my own personal experience and up to date medical research.

There are real labor problems here. Base pay is often insulting. Customer tips carry too much of the burden. Workers need better protections, more transparent algorithms, protection from arbitrary deactivation, and actual recourse when the app or a customer screws them over. Car-dependent delivery is also an environmental and infrastructural problem, though in a denser city I’d still be doing this work; I’d just be doing it by bike.

But when people talk about delivery work, I rarely see them talk to actual delivery workers. I see a lot of abstract arguments about convenience, consumer decadence, “hustle culture,” and internalized neoliberalism. Meanwhile, when I’m out working and waiting in restaurants for orders, the other Dashers I meet are usually people who only speak Spanish, people who read as neurodivergent, visibly physically disabled people, or some combination of the above.

I have not met this mythical Disco Elysium poor ultraliberal hustlegrinder-wannabe people seem to be arguing with. Maybe that archetype exists somewhere. If it exists among any kind of gig worker, it would probably be rideshare drivers. But most of what I see looks less like “rise and grind” and more like “this is one of the few forms of work available to people who need flexibility, low barriers to entry, limited managerial surveillance, or a way to work around language barriers, disability, burnout, chronic illnesses and injuries with symptoms that come and go unpredictably, caregiving, résumé gaps, or discrimination.”

That does not make the current system good. It means the current system is filling a real gap that a lot of supposedly better systems do not even acknowledge.

As a disabled person who is burnout-prone and demand-sensitive, contracting as a delivery driver has given me an unprecedented level of financial flexibility. I can work when I have capacity. I can stop when I’m deteriorating. I can build my day around my actual body instead of being trapped under a manager who thinks “reliable” means “able to perform the same way every day no matter what.” That matters. It does not cancel out the exploitation, but it is also not fake just because it is politically inconvenient.

And delivery itself is not some inherently decadent evil. Sometimes people live alone. Sometimes they are sick. Sometimes they are disabled, exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, overloaded, or recovering from something else - perhaps the stress and fatigue induced by their own job. Sometimes they need medicine, groceries, or a meal that will actually unplug their sinuses instead of whatever generic community-care slop someone thinks they should be grateful for. Humans are allowed to need specificity. “Food” is not the same as “the food I can actually eat right now.”

A serious labor critique would ask how to make delivery work safer, better-paid, less tip-dependent, less car-dependent, less algorithmically punitive, and less precarious. It would ask what kinds of flexible, accessible work should exist for people who cannot thrive in conventional employment. It would ask how cities could support bike delivery, worker cooperatives, public infrastructure, and real protections without simply replacing one bad system with a moral sermon about how nobody should ever want takeout.

But a lot of the discourse does not do that. It treats convenience itself as suspicious. It treats wanting flexible work as false consciousness. It treats the needs of disabled people, immigrants, and other people who can't fit into traditional employment structures as details to be swept aside in favor of a cleaner political image.