Boots

In France if you suffer from hair loss as a teenage girl and cannot afford a real hair wig the school will try and force you to go to class bald. The school will make you buy a chemotherapy turban, you will buy two different so that the school can choose which one they prefer and you will prove that they are chemotherapy turban and not hijab but once you wear it they will change their mind and say it looks too much like a hijab and insist on you going bald or buying a real hair wig that you cannot afford.

oh and don't forget that many parts of France mandate by law how much skin women must show in swimsuits, which they claim is about not getting street dirt in public pools but which is disproportionately enforced on Muslim or even just Middle Eastern/North African women

Someone asked me a while ago if I still had a photo of the worst sink I had ever seen while apartment hunting in Los Angeles. I assumed I deleted it so I didn't answer the ask and now it's gone, but as it turns out, yes, I do still have a photo of it.

Do you think a lot of people here base their enjoyment of something on how much they agree with its politics (or what they perceive to be its politics)?

I don’t know about anyone else, but I, as a trans woman, do not know what it is to be a man. I know what it’s like to be surrounded by men, to be picked apart by them, to have masculinity enforced on me and to have my femininity degraded. I know what it’s like to be targeted for punishment, physically and sexually, for my femininity, for a girlhood the boys and men could see in me, to be queerbashed, to have my head slammed into hard surfaces, to have my genitals fondled, to be injured in all kinds of small and repetitive ways with things like pens, compasses, and so on.

The fact that socialization is a specious argument became obvious to me during an exchange I had with a trans-woman-exclusionist who insisted that my being raised male was the sole reason in her mind for me to be disqualified from entering women-only spaces. So I asked her if she was open to allowing trans women who are anatomically male but who have been socialized female—something that’s not all that uncommon for MTF children these days. She admitted to having concerns about their attending. Then, I asked how she would feel about a person who was born female yet raised male against her will, and who, after a lifetime of pretending to be male in order to survive, finally reclaimed her female identity upon reaching adulthood. After being confronted with this scenario, the woman conceded that she would be inclined to let this person enter women-only space, thus demonstrating that her argument about male socialization was really an argument about biology after all. In fact, after being pressed a bit further, she admitted that the scenario of a young girl who was forced against her will into boyhood made her realize how traumatic and dehumanizing male socialization could be for someone who was female-identified. This, of course, is exactly how many trans women experience their own childhoods.