three meals to anarchy

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

They are not treated as equals to Cis men in the hierarchy of society. They are denied medical care and housing options on the basis of their perceived biological sex characteristics. They are paid less than both cis men and cis women, face hiring discrimination, experience higher rates of violent crime against them, are more likely to be poor, etc.

can you imagine walking up to a post about transfem oppression and saying "hm I think we need some trans mens opinions on this woman's lived experiences"??? You would be chased off the post and into the aether. and rightly so

It’s not that being called a transmisogynist is “fine”, is that it’s an actual criticism of the behaviour, and so can be used on someone when there’s tangible transmisogyny you can point to.

While “theyfab” doesn’t have that same 1:1 link between the oppression it’s supposedly being used to call out now and the word. The word has nothing to do with transmisogyny.

In fact, the word theyfab has a history of being used to say those of us who are AFAB and use they/them pronouns aren’t really trans. The new word you’ve chosen is a slur that we’ve actively faced before from transphobes, long before anyone had the idea to use “theyfab” against transmisogynists.

like the recent estrogen legislation. estrogen should never be made a controlled substance. everyone should have easy access to gender affirming care, including DIY. but when people try to spread awareness for this serious issue by acting like trans men arent as affected by institutional transphobia, it just becomes an argument about disinformation, because testosterone is ALREADY a controlled substance. I want estrogen to remain an uncontrolled substance because I want to save trans women from the bullshit than trans men have been having to deal with for over 30 years. and then you have a bunch of people arguing about this bullshit with each other while the law just plods on thru the government and everyone loses.

I mean sometimes they do yeah. I know a white guy with monolid eyes and zero known Asian ancestors and he absolutely experiences anti-Asian racism on a fairly regular basis because people think he’s mixed Asian/white. I know a woman who was told throughout her life that she was Native as an adoptee with no known history or background who experienced incredibly violent amounts of anti-Native racism until she discovered as an adult through DNA test that she is 100% white. I know white people who tan incredibly dark in the summer comparatively that are constantly accused of being mixed race and experiencing racism due to that, usually anti-Mexican racism perpetrated against white people with Greek or Italian ancestors.

If you think cis butches don’t experience both transphobia and misogyny and homophobia for daring to be women who break gender roles while still holding onto their womanhood you’ve sorely misunderstood just how bad butches have it in this world sorry. If you don’t think cis queens experience transphobia and homophobia and misogyny for daring to be men who break gender roles while being loud and proud about it and still holding onto their manhood then you’ve sorely mistaken just how bad they have it in this world as well.

Not to mention all of the cis men who wear dresses and skirts and makeup and nail polish and heels simply because they like them who experience all of these things. All of the cis straight women who simply just exist but something about them doesn’t pass society’s “woman enough” test, leading to them being caught in bathroom bills and sporting rules and being attacked by people who mistake them for being transgender or gay.

Just like how straight people experience homophobia to such a degree that they literally beat their children out of any potential deviance from rigidly upheld gender roles and let politicians make jokes on national TV about how they’d drown their pre-teen kids if they came out as LGBT. Do you really think a straight kid still figuring themselves out hears that and doesn’t internalize that homophobia? Doesn’t rigidly hold themselves to some impossible standard so that no one could ever possibly think they’re gay? You don’t think straight teenage boys who maybe don’t pass some bully’s straightness test are getting the shit kicked out of them for “being gay” when, surprise, they aren’t? You don’t think all those kids being attacked by their priests and coaches and teachers are being told “this wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t gay” when they’re literally not gay? Do you know how many straight kids had close calls at my school that famously expels all gay kids, because someone made up a believable enough rumor? Do you know how many of them still got their shit kicked in even though administration ultimately decided to let them stay?

All bigotry is violent and all bigotry catches people it doesn’t “intend” to and hurts them as well. It doesn’t matter what someone’s label is, or if they even have one. It matters if the person enacting the violence is doing it because their victim didn’t pass whatever “acceptable enough” test they didn’t know they were being subjected to.

First: THIS RECALL IS NOT STATE SPECIFIC. IT IS NATIONWIDE.

here are the specific products and dates:

FDA page on this:

Watching countless fandom spaces look at two characters with vague conflict with each other and demanding to know "which side" of a relative-non-issue fans take. Are you team A or team B?

If you look at two plot devices participating in the most mild form of conflict and come away thinking they are Factions to wage war between and not just...a story that will probably unfold with an amicable conclusion cause it's fuckin american cable tv???

but if someone writes an article about how Gen Z men are actually SUPER conservative and think all women should stay in the home and be married by age 22, people on here's gut response is "fuckkkkk thats SO true we are so cooked #killallmen"

This is exactly why you need to interact with other queer people, especially those of different demographics than yours. Otherwise you end up with opinions such as these.

Like. Just stop for one second and read out loud what you're writing there; your hatred of men is blinding you to the oppression of your brothers. Would you dare say this to a gay man who lived through the AIDS crisis? One who spent his youth being bullied and beat up? One who got hate-crimed last Wednesday for going on a date in the wrong public space? One who lives in a place where holding hands in public could get him jailed, murdered, executed?

"Hello, you, gay man. I don't consider depictions of your identity and the way you love to be important or really queer at all. There is no meaningful difference between art depicting your life and art depicting the lives of hetero people. You and your kind are just as privileged, as ubiquitous, as welcome, as well-represented in art and culture as hetero people are, there is nothing revolutionary about your existence whatsoever."

And then allowed to punch the living daylights out of people like that.

Fucking tell that to Alan Turing, who was basically the inventor of the computer, on which they are typing that bullshit, who helped greatly in defeating the Nazis, and who was still prosecuted for being gay, sentenced to chemical castration, and who killed himself over it.