Caerysbyty

Oh wow... she's at it again!

The Boundary of Love by Luo Li Rong

because like. i literally could not have grown up as my gender no matter the circumstances of my birth. there's no hypothetical Normal Cis Girl version of me to yearn for. My "afab counterpart" (and we're not even getting into the intersex erasure of that whole concept, that's a different post) would not be a normal cis girl, they would be a nonbinary person who's every bit as lost and frustrated as me. No version of me got to grow up the right gender, even hypothetically.

however. there are nonbinary kids now who are getting an approximation of that. society still won't let them have a "gender normative" childhood because that's just not something that a template exists for, but there are nonbinary kids who get to just Be, and Be Supported. and I'm so glad about that.

Stratt was a historian. She wasn't just pirating for the sake of entertainment for the astronauts, she was doing a full historical backup of the planet. Who knows how much knowledge and communications ability, how much art and culture and history, how much niche knowledge of how to make specific pieces of modern technology or modern medicines, was lost as the wars for resources isolated everyone, as the death tolls led to the deaths of specialized trade workers and scientists, as the power grids failing across the planet (or cut off, potentially) led to all the cloud servers going dark. Stratt was facing methods of combating extinction and she did her best to ensure that if/when the Hail Mary worked, it would send back not just the hope of the future in the solution to the astrophage, but the restoration of history and culture and knowledge.

The core of the grievance is that Greek antiquity has been narrated on screen overwhelmingly by British and American actors for the better part of a century, for stories that belong to a culture that is very much still here. The Odyssey production, funded in part by several million euros in Greek government subsidies, produced a cast that is, to my knowledge, entirely non-Greek.

Why does this matter, though? Greek epics are part of the Western canon and taught everywhere. Doesn't that make them fair game, free to be reinterpreted by anyone without a second thought? To answer that, it helps to look at how they got folded into that canon in the first place.

Firstly, this is not a new phenomenon so much as the latest iteration of a much older one, traceable at least back to the eighteenth century, when parts of Europe began constructing ancient Greece as their own intellectual inheritance. The claim, in essence, was that the intellectual and aesthetic achievements of classical Athens flowed forward not into the Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian, Ottoman-ruled population actually living on that land, but into contemporary Western Europe.

That claim required a certain amount of erasure to hold together. The people constructing "Greece" as a philosophical and aesthetic category in Weimar, Paris, and London were doing so entirely without reference to, or need for, actual Greek input. Fortunately for them, at that exact moment, Greece was under Ottoman rule, and had no institutional voice in how its own antiquity was being interpreted by people who had never set foot there.

The consequences of that arrangement outlasted that moment. Modern Greeks have been forced to inherit both the prestige of their ancient ancestry and the burden of never quite living up to a version of themselves invented for them by outsiders -- a mismatch so pronounced that foreign visitors to Greece were frequently disappointed to discover that the Greeks they encountered bore little resemblance to the imagined version of Greeks dreamed up by the West.

surgeries require no external incisions.

every location in the body is operable.

medicine can be administered precisely to organs.

scanners are largely obsolete.

internal deformities can be spotted at routine checkups.

surgeries require no external incisions.

every location in the body is operable.

medicine can be administered precisely to organs.

scanners are largely obsolete.

internal deformities can be spotted at routine checkups.

(I'm going to copy paste some of the below from a similar conversation I had the other day so I apologise if there is anything that seems slightly off topic)

I think that the primary sticking point is that your description of TMA/TME primarily comes from the way that (trans) radfems and other bigoted people use it, instead of the way it's primarily used by the majority of people, especially trans women. An analogy I'll draw is your response feels like saying that feminism is bad because TERFS are bigoted. It's rlly important to remember that the people using TMA/TME to attack and put down trans men aren't the majority, and instead are a loud minority, and judging all of transfeminism and it's terms based on this minority can quickly tend towards bigotry.

As for TMA/TME itself (this is the part copy pasted):

Also I do kinda agree about your point about everyone being affected by transmisogyny, and in legitimate transfeminist discussions I do find that the name to be a bit off of what it's really trying to discuss. Realistically all the term exists for is because, for example, in traditional cisfeminism it's easy to discuss the concept of "women are the targets of misogyny". But when it comes to transfeminism it gets a little murky. Because just saying "trans women" excludes transfemme enbys among others. And while there are potentially broader terms you could try to use to encompass everyone, they can quickly become convoluted, and really the point is to discuss everyone that transmisogyny is targeting.

So when you actually approach tma/tme from a transfeminist perspective of trying to engage in genuine discussion of opression, it makes more sense, even if the words are a bit off.

I am truly sorry the way that these words have been used against trans men, and I can understand why you feel the way you do, but I really think it's important to not let a few bigots poison legitimate discussion. It's part of whats leading to the growing rift in the trans community, social media pushing the loudest cruel people to the surface, and people generalising entire groups (especially trans women) based on that.

So, I do somewhat agree that the original use of TME/TMA could potentially have been useful in discussions alongside other, more specific and more nuanced terms, because on its own TME/TMA is simply too binary to encompass the actual lived experiences of all trans, enben and intersex people, but acting alongside other terms, it could have been useful in discussions about transmisogyny and how it effects different people (although I’d still take this with a grain of salt, because as you say yourself, the language is still too rigid no matter what context it’s used in).

However, I disagree with the analogy used here, because I don’t think the two are comparable. I do believe that transfeminism itself has been hijacked by a loud minority, and does not reflect the wider transfeminist community (of which I have been a part of for many years, so I do have an idea of what I’m talking about here. This isn’t just a case of me looking at a few tumblr posts and deciding what I think TME/TMA means). But, when it comes to the actual TME/TMA acronyms, an entirely separate, exclusionary movement has essentially arisen from them to the point where they can no longer be used in a vacuum without acknowledging the wider harm that has already been caused.

Personally, I believe a lot of transfeminist discussions have been set back by the ideology surrounding the TME/TMA binary. To give an example, I sometimes see trans people (particularly trans men) use the term “female socialisation” to describe their experiences growing up in a society that viewed them as a women, and how that connects to their manhood. The actual crux of this discussion is still an important one to have when talking about things like reproductive rights amongst trans men that cis men aren’t affected by, but the actual term “female socialisation” cannot be used in these discussions because it is far too associated with TERF ideology and excludes the nuances and perspectives of how trans women are raised in a transmisogynistic society. In my opinion, I would not trust anyone who uses this term without being wary of what other beliefs they may hold.

Some of these trans people will be using it sincerely because they simply don’t have another term to put into words what they’re trying to explain, but that’s symptomatic of discussions that have not had the necessary time, space or input from other trans and intersex people to evolve better and more inclusive language.

forgot about mr. beard but yeah that made so upset on his behalf!!!!!

no this too. i do feel there's this. expectation. that all nonbinary people will be rather apathetic about their genders, that the "good" nonbinary people (who isn't "crazy" and "dramatic" and "trying so hard to be woke") don't really care about what pronouns or nouns you use, will be binarize themselves in whatever way is easiest for the binary people & system around them, will be largely unobtrusive about their gender unless it can be a funny joke for binary people (even "inclusive" ones).

this post is ABSOLUTELY including misgendering enbies as the "opposite" gender btw. it is no less fucked up & i'm really sorry you have to deal with

personally i've started thinking maybe we could use a neologism, similar to malgendering for misgendering, to describe the kind of forced detransitioning/conversion therapy that nonbinary/genderqueer people are subjected to, where the goal is not to make them cis but to make them binary and thus palatable to cisness through forced binary transitioning.

also here's a hot take. we talk way less about this ^ kind of misgendering because its something that unites nonbinary people regardless of gender we were raised as. when you just focus on misgendering-as-perceived-sex you group trans men&mascs with nonbinary people raised female and trans women&fems with nonbinary people raised male. but what is described above is exactly what i have heard from nonbinary people who are transmasculinized.