V

"no"

okay but can we talk about how Pikachu has been a TERF sympathizer THIS WHOLE TIME and we just... let him get away with it because he's cute?

y'all really looked at a small yellow creature who refuses to evolve, refuses to be "put in a ball," and refuses to respect boundaries and thought "aww, feminist icon!" NO. that is NOT what is happening here. that is a reduction of what is happening here.

let me break this down because i'm literally shaking.

first of all—the electric type. you know what electricity does? it gates. it creates barriers. it says "you cannot pass." Pikachu's entire move set is about establishing boundaries and defending them with violence. thunderbolt? that's a boundary. thunder wave? that's literally the "you're making me uncomfortable" of pokemon moves.

but here's where it gets DARK.

he won't evolve into Raichu — this is not "trans joy." this is "i am biologically essentialist about what a Pikachu IS." he looked at evolution—at CHANGE—and said "no, actually, i was born perfect and any alteration to my body would be a desecration of God's design." that's not radical acceptance, that's gender critical ideology with a lightning tail.

his relationship with Ash — Ash is clearly a confused child being manipulated by an adult-adjacent electric mouse. "Pika Pika" is not cute, it's dogwhistling. every time he says it, he's testing the waters for who in the vicinity is "gender critical." he's building a community. he's networking.

the Thunder Stone incident — remember when they tried to MAKE him evolve and he literally electrocuted the concept? that was a protest. that was "get your hands off my biology." but make no mistake: this is ONLY acceptable when it's about not changing. the moment someone ELSE wants to evolve, suddenly he's very "protect the children" about it.

the Team Rocket of it all:

Jessie and James are the most gender-nonconforming characters in anime history. they crossdress EVERY EPISODE. they are living their truth. and who is trying to blast them off every single time? who is literally weaponizing electricity to silence transgressive gender performance?

Pikachu.

he doesn't care that they're criminals. he cares that they're confusing the binary. he sees James in a bikini and his little electric brain short-circuits with rage. "PIKA!" he screams, which translates roughly to "biological reality!"

why this matters:

because Nintendo has been quietly platforming this ideology for DECADES. while we were distracted by Jigglypuff's nonbinary energy (valid), Pikachu was becoming the face of "sex-based rights" in the pokemon world. there's literally an episode where he refuses to enter a contest because it's "for girls only" and instead of challenging the binary, he RESPECTS IT and watches from outside like a little yellow guardian of biological reality.

and the WORST part? the other pokemon agree with him. you think Eevee—literal evolution incarnate—feels safe around Pikachu? absolutely not. there's tension there. you can see it in the Smash Bros taunts.

the implications:

if Pikachu—global mascot of the highest-grossing media franchise in human history—can be quietly gender critical for 25+ years while we all buy his plushies and put him on our keys, what ELSE are we missing? is Togepi a SWERF? is Snorlax just "concerned about women's sports"???

This isn’t the article I recalled, but an example anyway:

Morningstar was hired but given a 90-day probationary period; for men it was 30. Then the gear theft and tampering started. Her gloves, hoods, and radio vanished (2007); her mask was sabotaged (two weeks after 9/11). She found what appeared to be semen on her bed (2012). Clothes continued to be stolen and destroyed. Word of the harassment rose all the way to Mayor Don McIlroy, and the department issued a warning against equipment tampering, but nothing substantively changed. 

Another:

Her concerns included having her firefighting gear tampered with several times

And another:

Ever since Judy Brewer became America’s first female firefighter 45 years ago, women have been hazed in the fire service, including sabotaged oxygen tanks and glass in their boots.

More:

You're living twenty-four hours a day in a firehouse and nobody will talk to you. Shit in your boots. Women at the front end of a fire hose and a fire scene and the water gets cut off from her.

my sister is a case manager and has trans clients, so i can extend some respect there, that it's literally her job to get resources for these people. i tried to make it clear that i don't wish harm on trans people and i do believe they are marginalized as well and are deserving of legal and physical protections; it's bizarre to have people who KNOW ME, my own sister and friends, assuming that i think any GNC people should be thrown out into the cold with nothing. it just shows how deep this shit the brainwashing runs, that they can't separate me as a person from ideology. but why, i ask over and over again, WHY must this be at the expense of women's safety? why is it ALWAYS at the expense of women?

i don't even want to say "natal women" or "biological women" anymore because all that does is reinforce their claims. i'm also not going to use to the term 'trans women' anymore but will stick with 'trans identifying males.'

one of the girls there ended with "well for my part i just want to say that i'm personally comfortable welcoming all different types of people into the bubble fo womanhood" ok that's great for you, but what about women who have suffered at the hands of males? women with trauma? little girls who aren't ready to see a naked male body? it really illuminated to me how complicit women are in their own oppression and i'm feeling really fucking down about it today. the hatred for women just runs so deep, i feel like i can't even wrap my mind around it.

Like Pride and Prejudice but instead of the love interest getting dissed for his toxicity and then reforming, it’s just two people bonding over dissing a dead toxic asshole.

you know what kind of language DOESN’T include me? “people who menstruate” or “people with a uterus.”

y'all claim that “terfs” are the ones who don’t account for infertile women, for women who’ve had hysterectomies, for premenstrual girls, for menopausal women, for intersex women. y'all say “terfs” reduce people to their genitals. but the reality is that isolating bodily functions and organs as defining characteristics of a cohesive group of people: 1) actually results in exclusion, 2) actually reduces people to their genitals, and 3) obscures misogyny by pretending issues affecting the female body “affect people of all genders.”

let’s go through some examples of females who may not menstruate/have a uterus/have ovaries/etc:

- a premenstrual girl. not included in “people with periods.” may not currently need, say, access to bathrooms that have sanitary pads. most absolutely needs comprehensive education on her body and how menstruation works for when the time comes.

- a woman with PCOS who’s stopped menstruating. not included in “people with periods.” still in absolute need of research on her female-specific condition because doctors still don’t know what exactly causes it or how to effectively treat it.

- a woman who had an oophorectomy because she had ovarian cancer. not included in “people with ovaries” or “people who produce more estrogen than testosterone.” would maybe still have her ovaries if her male doctor had believed her when she first started to feel pain and her cancer had been treated early on. still has the same hormonal needs as other females and needs to be on HRT.

- a woman who became infertile after having a clandestine abortion. not included in “people who can get pregnant.” would have possibly not become pregnant if she’d had access to education and contraceptives and if we didn’t live in a world where men raping women was commonplace. could have had a safe abortion if women were granted full autonomy over their bodies.

- a girl who was the victim of fgm. not included in “people with a clitoris.” would not have been the victim of fgm if men did not specifically seek to control and punish female bodies.

please register your interest via (non-anonymous!) asks or dms if this is something you might want to be part of; i would like to make sure we have at least a few active and invested women present for the start of it, to not immediately run out of vital momentum once the server (hopefully 🤞🏻) launches

i would like for this to be a space of revival of local feminist culture, a tribute to the amazing women who came before us and, most importantly, a way to foster new in-person connections. the obvious safety concerns are something i would like to see addressed collectively once enough of us get together. the ultimate vision for the server includes private location-based chats as well as a forum to coordinate group plans for FiLia 2027. ultimately, though, you can keep your more specific location as private as you wish!

I grew up in the 1960s on the West Side of Chicago. My mother died when I was six months old. She was only 16 and I never learned what it was that she died from - my grandmother, who drank more than most, couldn’t tell me later on.

It was my grandmother that took care of me. And she wasn’t a bad person - in fact she had a side to her that was so wonderful. She read to me, baked me stuff and cooked the best sweet potatoes. She just had this drinking problem. She would bring drinking partners home from the bar and after she got intoxicated and passed out these men would do things to me. It started when I was four or five years old and it became a regular occurrence. I’m certain my grandmother didn’t know anything about it. 

She worked as a domestic in the suburbs. It took her two hours to get to work and two hours to get home. So I was a latch-key kid - I wore a key around my neck and I would take myself to kindergarten and let myself back in at the end of the day. And the molesters knew about that, and they took advantage of it.

I would watch women with big glamorous hair and sparkly dresses standing on the street outside our house. I had no idea what they were up to; I just thought they were shiny. As a little girl, all I ever wanted was to be shiny. 

One day I asked my grandmother what the women were doing and she said, “Those women take their panties off and men give them money.” And I remember saying to myself, “I’ll probably do that” because men had already been taking my panties off. 

To look back now, I dealt with it all amazingly well. Alone in that house, I had imaginary friends to keep me company that I would sing and dance around with - an imaginary Elvis Presley, an imaginary Diana Ross and the Supremes. I think that helped me deal with things.

Even though I was a smart kid, I disconnected from school. Going into the 1970s, I became the kind of girl who didn’t know how to say “no” - if the little boys in the community told me that they liked me or treated me nice, they could basically have their way with me. By the time I was 14, I’d had two children with boys in the community, two baby girls. My grandmother started to say that I needed to bring in some money to pay for these kids, because there was no food in the house, we had nothing. 

So, one evening - it was actually Good Friday - I went along to the corner of Division Street and Clark Street and stood in front of the Mark Twain hotel. I was wearing a two-piece dress costing $3.99, cheap plastic shoes, and some orange lipstick which I thought might make me look older. 

I was 14 years old and I cried through everything. But I did it. I didn’t like it, but the five men who dated me that night showed me what to do. They knew I was young and it was almost as if they were excited by it. 

I made $400 but I didn’t get a cab home that night. I went home by train and I gave most of that money to my grandmother, who didn’t ask me where it came from. 

The following weekend I returned to Division and Clark, and it seemed like my grandmother was happy when I brought the money home. 

But the third time I went down there, a couple of guys pistol-whipped me and put me in the trunk of their car. They had approached me before because I was, as they called it, “unrepresented” on the street. All I knew was the light in the trunk of the car and then the faces of these two guys with their pistol. First they took me to a cornfield out in the middle of nowhere and raped me. Then they took me to a hotel room and locked me in the closet. That’s the kind of thing pimps will do to break a girl’s spirits. They kept me in there for a long time. I was begging them to let me out because I was hungry, but they would only allow me out of the closet if I agreed to work for them.

They pimped me for a while, six months or so. I wasn’t able to go home. I tried to get away but they caught me, and when they caught me they hurt me so bad. Later on, I was trafficked by other men. The physical abuse was horrible, but the real abuse was the mental abuse - the things they would say that would just stick and which you could never get from under. 

Pimps are very good at torture, they’re very good at manipulation. Some of them will do things like wake you in the middle of the night with a gun to your head. Others will pretend that they value you, and you feel like, “I’m Cinderella, and here comes my Prince Charming”. They seem so sweet and so charming and they tell you: “You just have to do this one thing for me and then you’ll get to the good part.” And you think, “My life has already been so hard, what’s a little bit more?” But you never ever do get to the good part. 

When people describe prostitution as being something that is glamorous, elegant, like in the story of Pretty Woman, well that doesn’t come close to it. A prostitute might sleep with five strangers a day. Across a year, that’s more than 1,800 men she’s having sexual intercourse or oral sex with. These are not relationships, no one’s bringing me any flowers here, trust me on that. They’re using my body like a toilet. 

And the johns - the clients - are violent. I’ve been shot five times, stabbed 13 times. I don’t know why those men attacked me, all I know is that society made it comfortable for them to do so. They brought their anger or whatever it was and they decided to wreak havoc on a prostitute, knowing I couldn’t go to the police and if I did I wouldn’t be taken seriously. I actually count myself very lucky. I knew some beautiful girls who were murdered out there on the streets.

I prostituted for 14 or 15 years before I did any drugs. But after a while, after you’ve turned as many tricks as you can, after you’ve been strangled, after someone’s put a knife to your throat or someone’s put a pillow over your head, you need something to put a bit of courage in your system. 

I was a prostitute for 25 years, and in all that time I never once saw a way out. But on 1 April 1997, when I was nearly 40 years old, a customer threw me out of his car. My dress got caught in the door and he dragged me six blocks along the ground, tearing all the skin off my face and the side of my body. 

I went to the County Hospital in Chicago and they immediately took me to the emergency room. Because of the condition I was in, they called in a police officer, who looked me over and said: “Oh I know her. She’s just a hooker. She probably beat some guy and took his money and got what she deserved.” And I could hear the nurse laughing along with him. They pushed me out into the waiting room as if I wasn’t worth anything, as if I didn’t deserve the services of the emergency room after all.

And it was at that moment, while I was waiting for the next shift to start and for someone to attend to my injuries, that I began to think about everything that had happened in my life. Up until that point I had always had some idea of what to do, where to go, how to pick myself up again. Suddenly it was like I had run out of bright ideas.

A doctor came and took care of me and she asked me to go and see social services in the hospital. What I knew about social services was they were anything but social. But they gave me a bus pass to go to a place called Genesis House, which was run by an awesome Englishwoman named Edwina Gateley, who became a great hero and mentor for me. She helped me turn my life around. It was a safe house, and I had everything that I needed there. I didn’t have to worry about paying for clothes, food, getting a job. They told me to take my time and stay as long as I needed - and I stayed almost two years. My face healed, my soul healed. I got Brenda back. 

Usually, when a woman gets out of prostitution, she doesn’t want to talk about it. What man will accept her as a wife? What person will hire her in their employment? And to begin with, after I left Genesis House, that was me too. I just wanted to get a job, pay my taxes and be like everybody else. But I started to do some volunteering with sex workers and to help a university researcher with her fieldwork. After a while I realised that nobody was helping these young ladies. Nobody was going back and saying, “That’s who I was, that’s where I was. This is who I am now. You can change too, you can heal too.” So in 2008, together with Stephanie Daniels-Wilson, we founded the Dreamcatcher Foundation. 

A dreamcatcher is a Native American object that you hang near a child’s cot. It is supposed to chase away children’s nightmares. That’s what we want to do - we want to chase away those bad dreams, those bad things that happen to young girls and women. The recent documentary film Dreamcatcher, directed by Kim Longinotto, showed the work that we do. We meet up with women who are still working on the street and we tell them, “There is a way out, we’re ready to help you when you’re ready to be helped.” We try to get through that brainwashing that says, “You’re born to do this, there’s nothing else for you.“ 

I also run after-school clubs with young girls who are exactly like I was in the 1970s. I can tell as soon as I meet a girl if she is in danger, but there is no fixed pattern. You might have one girl who’s quiet and introverted and doesn’t make eye contact. Then there might be another who’s loud and obnoxious and always getting in trouble. They’re both suffering abuse at home but they’re dealing with it in different ways - the only thing they have in common is that they are not going to talk about it. But in time they understand that I have been through what they’re going through, and then they talk to me about it.

People say different things about prostitution. Some people think that it would actually help sex workers more if it were decriminalized. I think it’s true to say that every woman has her own story. It may be OK for this girl, who is paying her way through law school, but not for this girl, who was molested as a child, who never knew she had another choice, who was just trying to get money to eat. 

But let me say this too. However the situation starts off for a girl, that’s not how the situation will end up. It might look OK now, the girl in law school might say she only has high-end clients that come to her through an agency, that she doesn’t work on the streets but arranges to meet people in hotel rooms, but the first time that someone hurts her, that’s when she really sees her situation for what it is. You always get that crazy guy slipping through and he has three or four guys behind him, and they force their way into your room and gang rape you, and take your phone and all your money. And suddenly you have no means to make a living and you’re beaten up too. That is the reality of prostitution.

Three years ago, I became the first woman in the state of Illinois to have her convictions for prostitution wiped from her record. It was after a new law was brought in, following lobbying from the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, a group that seeks to shift the criminal burden away from the victims of sexual trafficking. Women who have been tortured, manipulated and brainwashed should be treated as survivors, not criminals.

So I am here to tell you - there is life after so much damage, there is life after so much trauma. There is life after people have told you that you are nothing, that you are worthless and that you will never amount to anything. There is life - and I’m not just talking about a little bit of life. There is a lot of life.