specifically that transfeminisation describes a matrix of concrete social and institutional processes, through which AMAB people may become a part of the gendered abject. some of these processes might be in some cases intentional (self identification as trans woman or other locally prevailing transfemininity, working “as a woman”, willing submission to legal or medical apparatus of gender) we might also note that there is a coercive element via pressures to relate to a legible transfeminine gender identity for social, legal or medical affordances (precarity of nonbinary TMA identities, legal protections in the workplace, access to safe documentation access to policed clinical pathways). trans womanhood, then, is perfectly capable of being exercised as a coercive force- insofar as it is a representation of institutional respectability.

we can also note that many processes of transfeminisation are straightforwardly not agentic at all (we dont choose our subjection to social practices of abuse and exclusion based on perceived difference, for example). and it doesnt make sense to think of transfeminity on the whole as agentic as a result! many of these processes in fact, are often PRIOR to any conscious transition - it really badly limits our understanding to think about this as agent oriented!!!!

Consent as a model works best if ppl have enlightenment style rational consistent subjectivity. (Perfect self knowledge, consistent across time, coherent and unconflicted). Sober, enthusiastic, ongoing, verbal consistent is a set of guardrails to try and deal with the ways ppl fall short of enlightenment subjectivity but problems remain.

People don't have perfect self knowledge, and we regularly want to have sex we're conflicted about, have sex while drunk/high, have strong regrets that don't crystalize till after the fact, etc.

The guardrail model came in large part out of a desire to eliminate grey areas such that if something went wrong and someone got hurt, there was clear fault. But this model is deeply connected to the assumption of sex involving two parties, one active and one receptive, with the active party having a social power advantage and more or less sole responsibility regarding consent.

An underlying assumption is that if someone acquiesces to sex against their desire, it's due to coercion from the other party (who is at fault) or at least it would have sufficiently compromised the enthusiasm of the consent such that the other party should have been able to notice.

But trauma is complicated and I think it's real to say that sometimes the "party at fault" is a past abuser, or society at large, to the extent that it's anyone.

It's also completely possible that there's less-than-ideal consent without it being a huge deal, or that in the moment consent practices are as good as can reasonably be expected and someone still walks away traumatized. Or genuine negligence, that does hurt someone, but clearly doesn't belong in the same category as intentionally dismissing a partners non-consent.

If we reject state carceral systems, I'm not sure how useful it is to stay focused on blame in these types of situations.

More generally, I think one-size-fits-all models of consent really start to break down. With the mass education, public health type approach of sex ed, a one sentence check list of attributes (sober, enthusiastic ongoing and explicit) is about as much nuance as you can hope for. But it leaves a situation in which ppl are having drunk sex all the time, within scenes and ongoing relationships that have clearly chosen to accept it as legitimate, while essentially leaving a gun on the table. The ability to at any point declare consent illegitimate for a specific act since it wasn't sober.

The ongoing and enthusiastic elements are also notably ambiguous. Is that an explicit check-in every minute or so? Every 10 seconds? With each new act? How quickly do you need to catch a partner starting to dissociate before it makes you a rapist? How long can you let yourself be enraptured and lost in the act before you risk it?

This shit is messy.

But I do think it's straightforward to acknowledge that ppl build approaches to consent with each other over the course of multiple sexual encounters. Sometimes in ways that aren't explicitly about consent (eg making plans to get drunk/high and then fuck indicating a clear openness to non-sober consent) but sometimes explicitly (eg a large portion of my reason sexual relationships have quickly hit point of checking in to be like "are you comfortable if I try stuff with your body, within reasonable bounds, without checking in and trust you to tell me if it's uncomfortable?" Cuz that's way more hot and that is in fact an important aspect of sex. But I've also had recent partners I wouldn't make that offer with, it's about a specific rapport.

A lot of my inclination lately (in a way that seems to be a trend on here) has been towards a strong model of consent. That is, if I say I'm down for something, you can act on that and vice versa. Even if it's outside the bounds of traditional consent. That we can consent to acts that include risks, that we can consent in advance to non-consent in the moment, that we (with appropriate reflection and bounding) can agree to no safe word scenes if we want to, and if we have a bad time that isn't the other parties' fault.

In all of this, I lean towards an ethic of care moreso than one of blame. That is, a strong model of consent says that if I agree to something, you aren't to blame for acting on that, but we can foster a sense of care for each other, trying to form best practices for avoiding anyone getting hurt or otherwise feeling like shit. Rather than consent by default, that is shattered by the smallest departure moving the act from the category of consensual sex into the category of rape. Consent is a baseline we establish, and then we build up practices on top of it, collaboratively, as best we can. And none of us should have to bear the paralyzing fear that letting our guard down for a moment during sex could by way of negligence turn us into a rapist.

I think this model deals well with most of sex ed style consent's issues around rational subjectivity and one-sided consent.

It does not directly address questions of coercion however, and I think there's still a lot to say about what stays private as an agreement between directly involved parties and a more general, social sexual ethics, and how this all plays out when ppl who've been fucking have a messy falling out and care evaporates rapidly. (I'll get into coercion some here but leave the other aspects for later)

Regarding coercion, I think we can still say that active and deliberate moves to push ppl towards agreeing to something they otherwise wouldn't compromise consent. Asking someone over and over again is still pushy, pushing someone towards getting high/drunk in hopes that they'll acquiesce to the kind of sex you want is different from a mutual decision that you're fine fucking high and what bounds you want to set on that.

The lower level, not necessarily deliberate shit that gets labeled as coercion is messier. If a partner gets extremely sad every time you say no to the kind of sex they want, that absolutely creates pressure. But Im gonna reject any model that puts feeling the wrong feelings and failing to fully mask them in the same category as rape. I think these kinds of patterns are the opposite of care. I still subscribe to a strong model of consent and if you agree to something because you don't want to make a partner sad, that is still agreeing to it. But ideally I think everyone involved / around such a dynamic would try and identify if such a pattern is happening and hit the breaks (eg establish a hard and ongoing no to sex).

A) as some of y'all have pointed out, the guardrail model 100% can have some utility, especially for first encounters, ppl who are younger, and generally when you don't have a rapport with the ppl you're (potentially) fucking. I have big problems if it's taken as an absolute statement on what constitutes consensual sex vs rape and am a big fan of tearing normative assumptions around subjectivity wide open, but as a heuristic for specific contexts the guardrails can absolutely be useful.

B) the fundamental framing for me re: sex, potential coercion and power differentials is that there's no outside to power and no context without shit that at least theoretically could be leveraged. There are certainly situations where these dynamics are more acute, but hell, even if you're quite middle class, married and cohabitating there's still massive potential material/social/emotional consequences and thus all kinds of potential coercion.

Some of the most significant coercion around sex I dealt with was just the fact that I was on a lease with the person I'd been fucking and the penalties to get off it were substantial relative to my resources. Notably, there were power dynamics at play but it wasn't any one involved holding that power, it was the state of housing and landlord-tennant power relationships that created a backdrop of coercion.

But hell, even with a middle class married and cohabitating couple that very few ppl would suggest can't consent to having sex with each other, there's so much coercive potential at play.

I'm not trying to say anything black and white here, but I think some important pieces are:

1) a good framework for coercion and consent should be able to handle sex work and non-overtly-transactional sex with common principles, not as fully separate cases.

2) "you need to be financially, socially, and emotionally independent outside of your relationships" isn't a real answer.

3) I think there's a one-to-one relationship between the fact that we can't carve out a space for sex that's free from coercion and the fact that we live under a fundamentally coercive system. People who have enough privilege within the system that they don't feel the system as acutely coercive can better approximate a space for sex without coercive pressure but that's never gonna be most of us.

4) I think this is another place where it's helpful to think about an aspirational project of building towards a freer context for sex rather than needing to prohibit sex in contexts that aren't free from coercion. We work to carve out spaces where we can have relatively more autonomy under the system and where we can find empowerment in a general sense that sets us up to be less impacted by coercion around sex.

I'm gonna ignore your bad faith misreading of my ideas and your attempt to insinuate I am a child abuser and answer your first question for other ppls sake, cuz I think it is a reasonable thing ppl might be grappling with.

In a word, no.

In a few more words, I think the question fails to properly interrogate what I mean when I refer to evil. 'Evil' is a component of a moral framework, and I feel that moral frameworks are by and large shallow and not very useful in furthering for understandings of the world around us, or very conducive to creating material change, from an individual scale to a societal scale.

The central idea I put forward in that post is that it is not some grand moral badness that enables violence and abuse, but rather systems of power. All of your examples speak to this. You mention the wealthy, political leaders, a state backed by a global superpower, and a group that was comprised of people with systemic power over their victims.

Viewing them merely as "evil" is frankly uncurious and in some ways, cyclical and thought terminating. It begs the question: "they're bad because they're bad because they're bad."

We have NO disagreement in the fact that what those people do or did have produced violence and harm, many on a scale which is difficult to fully comprehend the magnitude of. It is equally difficult to understand even how one could act with such cruelty towards fellow human beings. But just because it is difficult to understand does not mean it is impossible. They didn't do those things because they were born with some kind of evil gene or soul.

They, like you and I, were created by the context of the world around them. If Adolf Hitler died as a child, would Germany have been rid of its antisemitism or have lost its imperial ambitions? Would war have been averted? Certainly not. There were specific, relatively measurable conditions which allowed fascism to flower. If not him, someone else would have helmed that movement.

If Adolf Hitler were born in another place and time, he would not be Adolf Hitler in any meaningful sense. A person is more or less a sum of their environment. People cannot exist outside the context that they do in fact exist in.

And so to then declare someone as 'evil' amounts to saying just about nothing. It's zero sum. If people do harm simply because they are evil, then what can be done? Create a list of them and then systematically exterminate them?

Many people have twisted my words and claimed that what I am saying is that we should expose our bellies and allow bigots to gut us, or that I equivocate violence against oppressors and violence against the oppressed. This is categorically untrue. When violence is brought against you, violent response can be prudent.

But what happens after the relations of power have been altered? When the abuser or oppressor no longer has the power to harm you? Is there reason to harm them besides to punish or sate a desire for revenge? If they no longer have the means to do 'evil,' then what purpose does violence against them serve besides for the sake of our own bloodlust?

You will not see me shed a tear for Israeli settlers killed by opposition forces, or for abusers killed by a victim defending themself because those relations of power are still in place. Settlers can leave, soldiers can dodge the draft, and abusers can stop abusing.

But if they settle, kill, and abuse because they are 'evil,' then what choice did they have to begin with? And what can be done to stop colonialism, state violence, and abuse in the future? Are evil people just going to stop being born?

"Sharks are nice" is a similar phenomenon in the opposite direction. Pop culture portrays sharks as malevolant killing machines who crave human flesh, so when people realize they're just animals who don't attack people any more than other predators, they overcompensate into thinking you can just swim with great whites with no danger.

humans are predisposed to find certain things more disgusting or disturbing, sometimes irrationally. dolphins but not sharks, some other animals but especially monkeys can perform very sadistic behaviors- exactly like humans, even infant humans- because malice implies intelligence, as opposed to simply violence or aggression.

Probably the most notable meme is Cena photoshopping someone else’s head (or an object) onto Stone Cold Steve Austin and saying “Stone Cold [thing in image]). He’s posted like hundreds of these

letting rats fall into the rice pot violates the buddhist concept of nonviolence, ahimsa. and this is one of the more dauntingly advanced cookbooks i've ever seen

ingredients: 1 grain of dust.

1. Focus

focus is the state or quality of being the active element of reference.

2. Ords

an ord is a level which contains one or more horts.

2.1. Interordal Relations

ascension/ascending is the relation from an ord to any superord.

descension/descending is the relation from an ord to any subord.

stansion/standing is the relation of the focus ord to itself.

a superord is an ord in question ascending from the focus ord.

a subord is an ord in question descending from the focus ord.

a coord is an ord in question standing in the focus ord.

3. Horts

a hort is a container of one or more jects.

3.1. Interhortal Relations

a superordal hort or superhort is a hort ascending from the focus hort.

a subordal hort or subhort is a hort descending from the focus hort.

a coordal hort or cohort is a hort standing in the focus hort's ord.

4. Directness

directness is the quality of being in an immediately adjacent ord. one can speak of directly ascending and directly descending for ords, or direct superhorts and direct subhorts.

5. Jects

a ject represents the common qualits among one or more atoms.

5.1 Interjectal Relations

a coject is a ject in the same hort as the focus ject.

two or more jects which share at least one atomic qualit are said to be normal jects.

completely dissimilar jects are said to be strange jects.

6. Atoms

an atom contains one to the qualitive limit of qualits.

7. Qualits

a qualit is the primitive unit of consideration. DON'T press me further on what qualits are.

the qualitive limit is how many qualits are present total in the system.

8. Alternative Terms

qualits may be described variously as infratomic, infrajective, infrahortive, and infraordinal.

any structure above qualits may be described as epiqualitive.

atoms may be described as infrajective, infrahortive, and infraordinal.

any structure above atoms may be described as epiatomic.

jects may be described as infrahortive and infraordinal.

any structure above jects may be described as epijective.

horts may be described as infraordinal.