th twin imp princessez

do u think jets of ppwerful water make my hard as fuck rock puppy body more loveable

Actually what do you do for a living? Is it full time? You get benefits per chance? Are you really more primed for revolution than the artist struggling to keep their head above water? Because I was working fast food and retail before the combination of chronic pain, PTSD and auditory processing just made it impossible to hold down employment. Because frankly I don't feel less desperate or exploited now than I did then.

I don't feel any more connection or empathy with the bourgeoisie or like I want to be like them. If anything the desperation has made me more hungry for change. But hey you aren't going to listen. You clearly treat theory like doctrine and refuse to actually consider the shift in relationships to labor over the past 200 years let alone consider the material conditions of the so called "small business owners" you think are unworthy of political consideration.

To say nothing of the fact that you have every consideration for disability when it comes to protecting hobbyists from criticism but absolutely no consideration for disability when it comes to disabled people who rely on being a "small business" to survive under capitalism. It just doesn't make you sound like someone genuinely class conscious or interested in meaningfully improving people's material conditions.

The class distinction between proletariat and petit bourgeoisie is not one about individual material outcomes or political leanings. There are landlords who are barely scraping by. There are wealthy business owners who are communists. But that doesn't change their class position. When Marxists say that the petit bourgeoisie is not a revolutionary class, it is not an indictment of its members or a declaration that the petit bourgeoisie as individuals can never be committed revolutionaries. It is merely the observation of the position of the petit bourgeoisie as a class in decline relative to the ascending proletariat within capitalism. The petit bourgeoisie continue to split into either proletarians or bourgeoisie, despite membership within the petit bourgeoisie continuing to be an attractive prospect for bourgeois-aspirant proletarians.

There is nothing morally wrong with running a small business to survive. If someone is making their living making keychains and selling them on Etsy, that doesn't make them a bad person. But they're not a proletarian. Someone who buys raw materials, uses their labor to turn them into something else, and then sells the resulting products is straightforwardly a petit bourgeois artisan, regardless of how poor they are or how much of a communist they are. They are not selling their labor-power, they are selling the products of their labor in competition with other products on the market. A proletarian, on the other hand, does not make a living selling any products. They make their living selling their labor-power to capitalist employers. It is their employer who owns and sells the products of their labor.

This doesn't become an outdated paradigm in the context of modern visual art. A freelance illustrator who works on contract for various projects is a proletarian. They don't own or sell the products of their labor and they don't expect to. They come into a project, work as part of a team, get their paycheck, and then someone else owns the final work as IP and profits from it. In contrast, an independent visual artist who sells art directly to consumers is petit bourgeois. They are selling the products of their labor on the market in competition with other producers of art.

As a result, the petit bourgeois visual artist has a fundamentally different relationship to IP than a proletarian visual artist does. The petit bourgeois artist by default holds the copyright to the art they create. They can sell the rights, they can sell copies, but most importantly they have the legal right to prevent other people from making unauthorized copies of any works they hold the rights to. This legal monopoly exists to bolster the profitability of IP ownership.

Now we come to the crux of your argument. Does AI image generation "alienate" indie artists from the products of their labor "at scale"? It's unclear what exactly you mean here.

A person could use an AI image generator to plagiarize particular works, but the model itself won't do that unprompted. If I tell the AI to make the Mona Lisa, that painting is famous enough for most models to overfit it and reproduce it somewhat accurately, but if I tell it to make an oil painting of a smiling woman with brown hair, it's going to give me novel images unrelated to the Mona Lisa or to any other such painting in existence. The concept of AI image generation as an "automated plagiarism machine" is not accurate. The influence of any particular image in the training data on the final model's weights are far too minuscule for any generic output to be realistically considered plagiarism.

On the other hand, the use of AI as a replacement for labor is a much more realistic concern. Employers and consumers alike are enamored with the idea of a machine that can create art at the fraction of the cost of human artists. So doesn't this mean that proletarian and petit bourgeois artists should be united in this front against the threat of AI? Not exactly.

Proletarian artists are at risk of getting hired less and earning less money if their employers decide to use AI image generation to replace some or all of their art needs. Their interests lie in preventing layoffs and wage cuts that could result from the unrestricted use of AI in the workplace. Petit bourgeois artists, on the other hand, are at risk of consumers choosing AI art over their own art. Their interests lie in preventing competition from AI in the consumer market and preserving their particular market niche.

So while both groups seem to face the same threat on the surface, the different ways in which they are threatened lead to different approaches to combating that threat. While proletarian artists have the opportunity to organize and negotiate particular contracts with their employers, petit bourgeois artists don't have that opportunity. That's why you see petit bourgeois and bourgeois artists both fighting to limit access to and development of open source and consumer-level AI image generation software via accusations of gross copyright violation and proposals to expand the scope of copyright.

Since proletarian artists don't own any IP and don't benefit from copyright, they don't have any dog in these particular fights. Even if Disney wins against Midjourney in court, it's not like Disney's employees will see any benefits. Disney could still train their own AI model on the vast amounts of IP that Disney has the rights to and their employees would still be at risk of being laid off and replaced by AI. Petit bourgeois indie artists on the other hand would benefit from consumers losing access to a popular image generation tool and thus there being less competition for art on the market.

The post discusses how Price had been on T for around 7 years, and fully passed as a man in public, only to to realise that it felt dysphoric from both its physical appearance and social position. It is now undergoing what it describes as a "transition/detransition/retransition/whatever the fuck you want to call it," by reverting to endogenous estrogen augmented with estrogen cream, it/its pronouns, and being "whatever the fuck I am from moment to moment, and accepting that it won’t be instantly recognizable". That's great.

My eyebrows were raised, though, by Price's saying "I think my transition has some real commonalities with those of trans women and trans feminine people," such as, "feeling joyful at being freed from the expectations of masculinity, even as it means encountering sexism a lot more," and, "though I will never be targeted by transmisogyny in the ways that my trans sisters are, I will never disavow you or my proximity to you, and I will use my new position to speak over sexist trans men and smack down other ignorant TMEs even louder." Hmm.

One has to wonder what "new position" Price is referring to here? It describes in the post itself how coming off testosterone and identifying away from manhood has reduced its social status, resulting in being treated less seriously in social situations. How could a lowering in social position empower Price to speak louder against sexist trans men? Surely another trans man is better placed to do that than any kind of non-man. The only way this statement makes sense is if Price is referring to an increased proximity to trans womanhood by virtue of the change in identity and hormone profile. I think this is reinforced by "I will never be targeted by transmisogyny in the ways that my trans sisters are," having the unspoken corollary "but I am targeted by transmisogyny all the same."

One has to read the rest of the post to find where these supposed commonalities with the transfeminine experience lie. Much space is devoted to physiological changes like skin-softening or muscle-loss (both relatable to transfems, but not really The Point) or else to improvements in vaginal health and the regaining of fertility. Talking about these could, I suppose, be construed as in poor taste given the assertion that it is a similar experience to transfems, but I am inclined to give Price the benefit of the doubt here given that it is principally a post about changes coming off T, and these are important changes, albeit ones which if anything demonstrate how different Price's "retransition" is to a transfeminine transition.

The only particular change mentioned in the post that mapped onto transfemininity was that of increasingly facing misogynystic street harassment and harassment born of the intersection between misogyny and racism, although it's hard to see how these are transfeminine experiences rather than generic experiences of those-perceived-as-women.

The real meaning, I guess, of Price's "I think my transition has some real commonalities with those of trans women and trans feminine people," comes in the list of things that haven't changed. Thicker body hair, facial hair, a lower voice, and some facial masculinisation stand out as examples that might be relatable to trans women. But whatever "commonalities" these could represent are rather hampered by the assertion that these changes are "lifelong or long-lasting, and thank god for that; I would not be as content in my funny little de-man-sition if I wasn’t holding onto some of my most coveted changes." So it is similar to a transfeminine transition in that there is e.g. facial hair, but Price does not find that facial hair distressing nor particularly want to get rid of it, nor apparently does it need to get rid of it (beyond shaving) to be read as cis female in public. As a trans woman who wants to get rid of her facial hair, who feels intense dysphoria whenever she sees it, but whose facial hair is so thick that it looks like a 5-o'clock-shadow even immediately after shaving plus a layer of concealer, I cannot say I see any commonality between Price's experience and my own.

I think, if anything, Price's post demonstrates how unlike a transfeminine transition its experience has been. One part of the post which stood out was a paragraph about Price's apparently frequent hours-long masturbation sessions. And while I think it's great that people can talk about this, and have no issues at all with Price doing so, I think if a trans woman was employed as a Professor at a prestigious educational institution like Loyola University there is no way she would risk writing something like that on her public blog. (And incidentally, I did check to see if there were any trans women employed at Loyola and could not find any, but cannot ofc be sure of that as a fact.)

Other similar examples crop up throughout the post. While living as a man, Price states that, "most hookups were surprised that I didn’t have a penis when they brought me home." Again, that's amazing, it would be great if we could all live in this world where we didn't feel that we might be murdered or imprisoned for bringing a hook-up home without disclosing our genital configurations, but some of us don't live in that world.

On another occasion Price refers to feeling free to behave again how it did as a child. "My friends and I behaved exactly like this when we were growing up. I have missed it. Being a swaying, fidgety, thousand-yard-staring girlie who eloped through public space like she owned it," it says, followed by, "as a man, I felt this kind of behavior was completely inaccessible." Given the context of this coming after Price's claim that its "retransition" gave it insight into the transfeminine experience, I find this reference to girlhood (plus the understanding that those given the social role of "man" are punished for behaving this way) to be somewhat unpleasant. "Walking down the street, I sing along to my music at full volume and feel more okay being seen," it adds. That's great, when I was 4 months into my transition I would wear a hoodie with the hood up no matter the temperature and speak as quietly as possible to avoid drawing attention to the very masculine features that Price is so proud of retaining.

A particularly odd paragraph is used to explain the increase in sexism faced by Price after no-longer identifying as a man. Price states that it had been using the term "detransition" when presenting as a man, and no-one objected. But as soon as it underwent its own "detransition" it started to get backlash from transfeminists calling it a "grifter". Price characterises this as a non-man being criticised for something a man can do with impunity, and therefore sexism. But this characterisation of transfeminists' behaviour hardly makes any sense. The idea that transfeminists are more lenient to men than they are to non-men (even those who do not face transmisogyny) is totally absurd and bears no resemblance to reality. Is it not much more likely transfeminists consider statements about "detransition" from a trans person to be far less notable or worthy of critique than statements made on that topic by a "detransitioner"? Price's framing of its "fellow trans feminists" as misogynistic is also a more-than-a-little concerning in light of everything else.

But really, all of these things I've mentioned were not the main source of my discomfort with this post. That came when Price said this:

After many years of trying, it seems to me that ‘manhood’ amounts to mostly this: harnessing the power that one holds over other people, particularly women, and repressing one’s weakness so that societal power does not go away.

And yeah, there's a lot of truth in that, but how did Price not know this already? To fully succeed at being a man requires you to oppress. Many an uncracked egg was transmisogynised in her youth because of her failure to oppress. I am one of those. Even well before puberty, I was telling off other boys for making sexist jokes or comments, the result of which was bullying, social exclusion and early-onset transmisogyny. I failed to be a man before I could even get started, because you are not allowed to fully be a man if you don't partake in the oppression of women.

Price says, "I was centered, uplifted, listened to, and respected when I was on T," but I was also "on T" (endogenously) and would've publicly referred to myself as a man for two decades and I was never centered, uplifted, listened to, or respected. Being "centered" is a two-way street: people give you the opportunity to take up space that could have been taken by someone else, and you take it. But in the taking of it you are centering yourself, you are a collaborator in your own centering. Testosterone doesn't magically give you "male privilege", it gives you the option of taking that privilege. And if you take that option rather than refusing it, even if you relent after some years, it says something about your character. To be clear, it is possible to be a man and be a good person, but that involves actively refusing to be centered and uplifted above women, it involves actively making yourself smaller so that women can be uplifted instead. And it seems it took Price a surprising amount of time to come to this realisation for a self-described transfeminist.

Devon Price is not a man, but all the same it was able to be a much better man than I ever was. It was able to reap the rewards of male privilege that I was never allowed to access. Devon Price is not a woman, but it is treated as a woman in society, and specifically treated as a cis woman, something I will also never be allowed to access. Price's article purports to demonstrate commonalities with the experiences of trans women, but what it actually shows is that society allows people like Price to choose between being treated as a man or as a woman, but society allows transfeminine people neither of those options.

------- these are all from the same post devon reblogged, please click the link for full context but i wanted to include a couple screencaps to give an idea what we're dealing with here.

I hate to be inflammatory but i was SHOCKED to see it had reblogged something like this nobody seemingly said... anything? until someone mentioned it to me in private when i was talking about some of its writings. (well not really that shocked, its hard to be surprised by this stuff anymore, but the overtness coming from someone whos written on transmisogyny, and the total lack of reaction, is upsetting)

His post amounts to saying that he socially transitioned briefly in the 90s, but stopped because he wouldn't be able to have the life of cis girl, and it is implied that his quality of life would be reduced by transition. And later he describes how he loves his male body in a way that has "nothing to do with orgasm".

It's hard to tell if he has considered that there are women whose quality of life is improved by transition (in spite of the transmisogyny he seems to be loosely aware of) because their pre-transition life was so awful. Seeing him say he realised transition "wouldn't bring [him] anything like the experiences of [his] female classmates" seemed a really odd framing to me, until I realised that it suggests he was having a normal cis guy childhood at the time and was just interested in trying out womanhood, but realised it was inaccessible. That's why his life would get worse with transition: it was already fine.

Rationally I know this is how a lot of transphobes think trans women's lives are, but it seems so odd to see it written down like this, it's so alien to any transfem experience I've ever heard. All he has realised is that he is a cis guy and not a trans woman 🤷. The jibe about orgasm is clearly just a bigoted reference to autogynephelia doesn't even deserve to be addressed.

The post by rame tarin that he's replying to is even stupider. The idea that "eggers" are not aware that some people are cis is absurd, just assuming a total incapability for rational thought on behalf of your ideological opponents. Maybe encouraging many people to transition is a rational strategic move in response to a cisnormative society that encourages everyone not to transition? Maybe they are already aware that some people who are just cis guys might be caught up in it. Maybe they don't care, because they're cis guys, and the wellbeing of cis guys does not need to be prioritised by trans women. Just the arrogance of these posters to post about things they barely understand at all, and which they talk about with a tone of great authority.