Logorrhea blog

We are not a house who cares much about gendering a baby's clothes. It's a BABY. It doesn't care. So we'd take the kid to yard sales and let them pick out whatever baby clothes caught their fancy and would fit. Some were 'boy' and some were 'girl'. Kiddo loved floral prints because they're a baby (yeah my kid has always picked their own clothes).

Anyway, my kid LOVED TO CLIMB. Sometimes.

It was weird. Sometimes they were all over the sofa and the playground equipment and MY LEGS and sometimes they just. Weren't. Couldn't figure out what was going on.

Until I caught them trying to climb on rhe sofa in one of their pretty flowered pants.

They COULDN'T LIFT THEIR LEGS PROPERLY. And gave up, and did something else.

So I tested this out and... Yeah. The kid COULDN'T climb in ANY of their girl pants. Any. Put them in boy clothes and suddenly the kid is on everything again.

We stopped buying girl pants completely until they were old enough to test them and my kid is a TEENAGER now and i still make them lift their legs individually and jump if it's a girl fit.

YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE TO MEAN TO DO IT.

actually here I'll just drop a screenshot

I want you try to envision that number. The population of the DPRK in 1954 is cited by various Western sources as being between 7.7 million - 10.2 million, however more contemporary sources seem to lean towards the larger number (7.7 million was estimated by the CIA in 1954)

If we say 10 million people, with 1.5 million casualties. That's 15% of the post-war population. 15%. That's a little more frequent than 1 in 7. Imagine one out of every 7 people you know being killed. This study estimates that the median individual has a social network of about 470 people. Rounding down, 15% of that is 70 people. Imagine 70 people out of everyone you know personally being killed. 15% is massive. It's a genuinely sickening and horrific figure.

In comparison, in WWII, according to Wikipedia the UK had a casualty rate of .94% of their 1939 population, and the USSR had a casualty rate closer with 13.7% of their 1940 population.

The United States is a hulking behemoth of death and cruelty and genocide. It is a machine dedicated to one thing, which is the extraction of power and profit at the cost of any amount of human life. Like all bourgeois imperialist powers, it is a mechanism for the transmutation of innocent human life directly into political-economic power.

Fictional small town in the middle of nowhere in real country: par for the course in any genre

Fictional major city in real country: standard fair, but it's usually clearly based on a real city

Fictional suburb of real major city in real country: strange but I can see the application

Fear of medicalization is a weapon of transphobia. Lots of people actually are scared of needles, scared of surgery, or don't want to medicalize their appearance. But they're able to hold casual conversation about injections and surgeries and medication when it's about anything other than transition.

Transphobia trains people to think of the grotesque parts of medicalization as a kneejerk reaction to mentioning a procedure. When you talk about an estrogen shot, you imagine the needle piercing the skin. When you talk about SRS, you imagine the skin being sliced into. When you talk about laser, you imagine the burning of the follicle.

Does that imagery give you a gut reaction? Does it make you uncomfortable? Does it make you squirm a little? Cuz I'd bet you could read those same words and screen out most of that feeling when talking about any other procedure. It's not that the fear isn't real. It's that your brain is programmed to take down its defenses against that rush of feeling when we talk about transition, as opposed to any other medical procedure. You can rationally know that transition related procedures have a ridiculously low complication rate and a ridiculously high satisfaction rate, but your mind is still feeding on that basal reaction all the same.

It's transphobia. It always is. It's decades of rhetoric about "butchers" and "mutilation" and lying about medical statistics, the imagery of little girls being carved up to be more masculine and the abhorrent description of vaginoplasty as "chopping your dick off". It invisibly seeps into people's brains, and gives them a more direct, unfiltered connection between their basal disgust with medicalization and seeing those words written out in text.

And no, you're not innocent of this if you're trans. Don't make that excuse for yourself. In fact, I would say that the call is coming from inside the house almost as much as its coming from outside. The way that some trans people talk about medical transition, even if they're positive towards it on its face, shows a connection to the grotesqueness of all medicalization that doesn't happen when talking about anything else.