welcome to your life, there's no turning back

can a trans man experience (cis) male privilege? yes. can a trans woman? yes. and so can a cis woman! hell, a femme perisex cis woman with a gender neutral name could if she's assumed to be a cis man on a resume. male privilege is not an on/off switch. the idea that it is stems from cissexist understandings of male/female as entirely separate and static categories which everyone can and must be understood through. trans people in feminism are expected to constantly defend and deflect accusations of being Privileged Male Oppressors by promising cis perisex women that our experiences are just like theirs! we don't have any scary opinions that don't align with their worldview! we swear we won't ever make them have to reflect on how being cis+perisex has biased them and potentially made their analysis of gender at all inaccurate! trans experiences are only considered valuable to cisfeminism to the extent that they reaffirm what cisfeminists already hold true. thats why they only ever want to talk about a very simplistic narrative around wages pre/post-transition. its extremely unthreatening to cis people because it presents transness in patriarchy as just going from one cis role to another; it doesn't ask cis feminists to expand their paradigm to include the ways in which trans people are treated as a class and their own complicity in transphobic oppression.

which is why trans men have been getting fucked over by trans-affirmng cisfeminism. because by virtue of having our gender acknowledged, we are expected to forfeit our place in the feminist movement and adopt the role of outsider along cis men*. and its also why trans women and MTX people get fucked over the minute they cannot or refuse to describe their experiences through the one or two approved narratives. cisfeminism cannot tolerate transness-as-transness. it has to be compressed and reduced and diluted into something that fits within a cis-centric framework. we aren't allowed to have nuanced and intersectional conversations about trans men & other trans folks relationship with male privilege, the things we have to sacrifice to there, how fleeting it can be, the fact that for some of us being read as "biologically male" is actively more dangerous than being read as female... if it isn't familiar to cis women, then it means you aren't really oppressed.

however. since i have seen this post several times without any corrections. i just wanna put this here.

(source link)

Okay, let them stay up till 5 in the morning and feel like shit for the next day, eat a bag of candy in one go and have a huge stomach ache, go out without an umbrella and catch a cold, watch a violent movie and get scared?

if you scribble on your toys with marker, you're gonna have scribbled toys, and they'll be ugly. if you break your toys on purpose, you wont get new ones. if you refuse to get dressed in the morning, then you'll be dragged to school in your pajamas. if you don't clean up your room, i wont come tuck you in.

Children should be allowed to draw on their stuff without it being considered ugly and break it without that being a reason to not buy them anything. Safe destructive actions are necessary for development. That's part of what toys are for.

And nobody should be dragged to school, period.

Anything that involves "because I did that, my parents did this" is now a consequence of the parent's actions. Negative consequences of parent's actions designed to coerce obedience are punishments.

These are the necessary definitions you need to understand before entering this conversation, so that you can understand why your parents' actions here are being described as punishment.

There are appropriate ages for a child to develop a complex understanding of others' thoughts and begin grasping that they can "cause" others to act in particular ways by impacting others' internal thoughts (not just by completing an input-output pattern). And there are safe ways to encourage developing that type of meta cognition.

Neglecting your young child's need for ritual and affection before the difficult task of being in a dark space alone with no way out is neither age appropriate nor safely encouraging development.

If a child is young enough that they need the emotional support of rituals like being tucked in, they are also young enough that their understanding of others' thoughts is limited. That's the developmental stage they are in. So, all they are learning is a pattern. They are learning, "my safety network is contingent on obedience to rules no one has explained to me or allowed me to explore. If I want the output of safety, only the input of obedience is accepted."

That is a punishment. It is a coercion to obedience caused by applying negative stresses on a child.

You can understand what your mother was trying to do now, thanks to your more complete social and neurological development. But you literally could not understand it then. All she was doing was hurting you in a way that made you obey.

no more gendered dress codes. no more gender markers on passports, driver's licenses, ids. i'm not talking about "adding x" or "adding a third category" i'm talking about no more categories, period. why does the government need to know what my genital situation is? why does the government feel the need to assign me a sex on the basis of genitals? why does the cop who pulled me over need to see an m, or an f, or an x?

no more "gender is a social construct, sex is the thing that's binary." sex is not binary. abolish the idea that it is. normalize conversations about intersex traits. being intersex is natural. the sex binary is a thing imposed by the state.

no more gendered sports. if you really care about equity, sort people into categories based on skill level and athleticism, not gender or sex. the concept that there are only two sexes and that one is inherently weaker than the other is pseudoscience. the male/female hunter/gatherer dichotomy is not based in fact, and is a product of modern sexist cultural biases. one gender is not inherently subservient to the other. people are not inherently different on the basis of sex or gender. it is just more complicated than that.

the concept of multiple genders and sexes beyond the man/woman male/female dichotomy has existed as long as humans have existed. the sex binary only serves to benefit the patriarchy. the gender binary only serves to benefit the patriarchy. continuing to impose it just controls (and harms) the people it forcibly categorizes.

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.

You don't have to be a jerk about it. The most effective yet civil way of dealing with harmful "humor" is just pretending you don't get the joke and asking them to explain. "I don't get it, what's girl math? What's a girl dinner? What do you mean by you're just a girl? Can you explain the joke to me?"

It exists as a standardized unit to calculate the nutritional information. That’s it. It is just “if you eat this much, this is how much nutrients you will get”.

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you see one on the street,

For decorum is essential when a lobster you must greet.

You may comment on the weather, compliment his choice of hat,

But crustaceans like their space if one should stop them for a chat.

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you’re strolling down the coast,

Simply nod and give a greeting, or a handshake at the most,

For a lobster’s first priority is formal social graces,

And one seemes over-familiar if a lobster one embraces.

Don’t ever hug a lobster when you meet one in the sea,

For a lobster’s spines and chitin make it difficult, you see,

And he might become self-conscious if you bring that fact to light,

''The founding of Israel was based on displacement of Palestinians''- Look, I don't want to minimize that at all because people losing their homes is fucking terrible but that doesn't mean the solution is expelling Israelis now. There was a population exchange between Greece and Tuurkey in 1922. Both sides ethnically cleansed people. It was a terrible thing to do. But both Turkey and Greece exist now as two seperate states with clearly defined borders (if you ignore some shit erdogan tries to pull in the agean). And you don't question Greece's or Turkey's right to not be wiped off.

''Israeli identity is fake because it was based on smth that happened 3000 years ago!!!''- Ok sorry to break it to you but us Greeks have made our entire national identity revolve around who we were 3000 years ago. And if you want to argue abt fakeness of identity I would argue ours was a less organic one. Jewish people maintained the same religion and basic belief systems for 3000 years. They continuously felt the connection with Eretz Yisrael. We switched to Orthodox christianity from whatever 12 god shit we had, we lost most of our literacy that allowed us to keep tpuch with ancient texts, we embraced so many customs from the Ottomans and YET it was still valid when we tried to reclaim our ancient greek identity to build a nation partly on the basis of that

''European colonial powers helped prop up Israel which means it is an imperialistic state!''- Do you think Greece got independence or gained more land purely through OUR military strength lol?