clever gay idiot

No shirt, no bra, completely bare torso, just like cis men are allowed to

It's about desexualizing breasts and "female presenting nipples" and not being criminalized for our bodies if we want to go topless because it's a million damn degrees out. This was a popular growing movement that was still widely known a decade ago!

it would be so awesome

funnily enough kym has like the most complete and comprehensible coverage of the ceo's little stunt that i've found so far. link to their article

yes! nail on the head right here. like yes, it's worth it to be like "fuck stephen king" and criticize the particulars of his transmisogynistic writing, but the broader point is that this is what transfemininity looks like in pop culture and it's what it looks like right now!

Next slide. “Brandon Sanderson is a member of the LDS”. The muttering has changed tone

“It’s not a very big amount of money though.” Someone in the audience pipes up. “His cut is only a small fraction of the cost of the book, and then-“ my next slide shows an income breakdown, it is titled ‘a small fraction of $10,000,000 is still a big number’

It has some genuinely fascinating stuff to say about gender, and I feel like it's worth looking at/thinking about in the context of Historical Gender Stuff. This 100 year old book has the following to say:

"The truth is that some young gentlemen would rather they had been born young ladies: they cannot admit this openly, because in the male world to confess as much would lead to instant ostracism if not worse; but they cannot conceal it either, and by preferring the company of girls, and soft, feminine clothing, and by flinching during the rough pursuits to which all boys, willing or no, are occasionally heirs, they attract opprobrium."

"Such boys weep too readily for their fellows' tastes - weeping is a great crime among boys unless it is generally admitted that circumstances left little choice - and are hounded for that reason."

"Just as there are girls who had rather been boys - we all know examples of the type - there are boys who, in a kinder world, would have been born into the gender more suited to their dispositions."

"Many young people of this sort are riven with a guilt they do not deserve but have been forced, by the conventions of society, to adopt; they are confused, ashamed and thoroughly unhappy."

"The ideal thing to do would be to treat these cases on their merits, send them to girls' schools, and so on. (The same thing should happen with those girls who would rather be young gentlemen.) Boys of this sort are girls in any case-in all respects save one."

describing this as generalized transphobia flattens out the differences in how variously trans people are variously discriminated against. framing this as transmisogyny correctly focuses our attention on the ways in which discrimination which uniquely targets transfems is weaponized. there will no doubt be downstream effects felt by any number of transmisogyny exempt people, and they will rightly feel upset about the injustices they will experience. i do not want those things to happen, but they will and it will be bad and wrong when they do. but the first people targeted will be those least able to exempt ourselves from transmisogyny, those named explicitly in the majority opinion.

you'll pardon me for not sparing much consideration for future injustices when my sisters and siblings are already suffering, already being cast out and labeled as dangerous, things whose inclusion is a bourgeois luxury reserved only for when we have the time to weigh the complications and the nuance.