"𝙄𝙛 𝙄 𝙢𝙪𝙨𝙩 𝙗𝙪𝙧𝙣, 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙣 𝙄'𝙡𝙡 𝙩𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝙢𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙧𝙤𝙣𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙖𝙡𝙡."

~~~

A fanart of Princess Malini from 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗞𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗱𝗼𝗺𝘀 books by Tasha Suri 🔥 I'm soo excited for The Lotus Empire release. Another reason why November can't come soon enough!

"Dyke March 1994" by Morgan Gwenwald

But I know that's not true. That's just fantasy. Kid's stuff.

"I do not get 'clocked' you cannot 'clock' something that's being actively presented to you I'm aggressively transsexual in all areas of my life there's no 'clocking' there's just obtuse and disrespectful behavior and THAT is what *I* am clocking constantly"

like, I think a lot of people currently posting the most cringe takes about rap right now would very much agree that Racism Is Bad and probably even acknowledge that rap has been and is still widely maligned and devalues for racist reasons.

but that last step, acknowledging that your personal tastes and interests are also influenced by systemic racism, is where a LOT of people stumble. it's very easy to assume that because you consider yourself against racism, then your tastes and interests cannot possibly be at all informed by racist. if you're a white American, that's simply extremely unlikely to be true.

speaking from personal experience, I had to Work to decenter whiteness in my media tastes. when I was like 19 I listened to a podcast where a white Jewish man talked about keeping a spreadsheet of the books he read to make sure he was reading a roughly equal number of men and women, and I started doing the same thing to track how many authors of color I was reading. at the time I took pride in my belief that I was reading diversely, but when the year ended I was shocked to discover that people of color had written barely a quarter of the books I'd read. I had been giving myself way too much credit while still unintentionally prioritizing white authors, because white authors were the ones I knew best. so I started making an extremely conscious effort to seek out books by authors of color, both fiction and nonfiction, that sounded like my kind of shit.

music was extremely similar. I grew up a little white girl in a very white city in a very white state; nobody was offering me an education in rap or r&b or soul or hip hop. as an young adult there were definitely some Black artists I liked, like Janelle Monáe, but I had to take the initiative of seeking out more artists to find out who I fuck with. you're not going to like everybody, which is fine, but are you even giving anyone a chance? are you even looking?

One of my oldest trans patients is in her late 50s. She’s had blood clots that went to the lungs. Repeatedly. Smoking raises that risk. Estrogen raises that risk. She’s a veteran with PTSD; of course she smoked.

These aren’t theoretical. These are humans I’ve cared for over years of their lives. I have been rooting for them—my beloved former addict, who spoke without shame about her years of homelessness and drug use in the city; my queer elders, who are slowly trading in their motorcycles for power scooters. I want everyone to live their fullest, best life.

Smoking doesn’t fit into that. Please don’t smoke. I don’t want you to die like that—not now and not later. I want you to have the future that you may not be able to see yet, but exists.

So, just a reminder that spite is a great reason to quit smoking.

- smoke less! Make arbitrary rules about when you get to smoke. Tie smoking to some thing you hate to do but need to get done. Like, I only get to smoke when I do (thing I gotta do). Or I only get to smoke... when I am dressed for the day and have left the house. Whatever works from where you're starting. No smoking indoors, whatever, only 1 cigarette after work, make shit up

- If you're doing the "i only smoke when I drink" or "I only smoke socially" and it's becoming hanging out w smokers more often or drinking more often -> switch it up w prior thing new rules. I only smoke... alone. I don't smoke... with coffee. Whatever. Smoking w other smokers IMO only leads to more smoking don't do that for either of you

- Get your space smelling less of cigarettes. Like, wash your clothes all of em, designate one item your smoking jacket or whatever. Basically work to overcome the olfactory fatigue so you can actually smell how much you stink. I swear this one works even if you currently feel that you like the smell

- if you JUST STARTED, but your mental health is so shit that you don't have it in you not to smoke, moderate as well as you can to stave off the actual addiction part. Like, switch to lower nicotine cigarette brands (lights don't mean less, google this one). Don't smoke every day. Go every other. Make that your hard line - not every day. Give future you a better chance at kicking it

- In any context of this any starting point, supporting yourself through other avenues will help. Quality sleep, nutrition, exercise, mental health care, whatever all the basics anything achievable for you do those things if you can

- Substitute treats. Pick other things to treat yourself. Food, tv, bed rot, whatever. Let your id have other stuff that's not smoking

I really dislike this framing for several reasons - one is that it is in fact arguing that gender is biologically based by tying it to our ‘natural sex’ (if our gender ‘conflicts with’ our sex, then gender is still biologically based, and if the reason you want to change your gender is because of mental illness, then a desire to change one’s gender can only be gained through psychological abnormality). It also maintains sex as something that is real, unchanging, natural, and universal across space, time, and culture. It is none of those things -

sex can change (HRT, surgery, and so on changes our sex, in fact it’s called ‘sex reassignment surgery’ and HRT is comminly understood as initiating a ‘second puberty’),

sex is not binary - a belief that it is binary is what constructs the category of ‘intersex,’ ie people who don’t fit this supposed universal sex binary, and this construction produces medical violence against intersex people by positioning them as medically defective/abnormal,

sex is not ‘real’ in the sense that the category of ‘sex’ is a social construction that bundles a complex series of properties of the body (external genitals, reproductive organs, hormones, chromosomes, gametes, etc) together by claiming they always 100% coincide with each other and form a coherent whole (this is not true, ‘sex’ is a spectrum because sex refers to many, many things). You can read the work of Julia Serano, a trans biologist who has published many open access essays on this subject. I believe she recently published a piece critiquing the idea that gametes are binary

The process of assigning sex at birth does not even follow this supposed scientific fact properly, because we don’t run chromosome checks on infants, we don’t do ultrasounds on them to see what their internal organs look like, we don’t measure their hormone levels, and so on. Sex assignment at birth is a social process of doing a quick genital inspection of infants and then writing down their sex on birth records based on that inspection, and if those external genitals don’t conform to binary understandings of sex (eg the infant is intersex), these genitals are surgically altered to fit this binary model. I believe Adamson describes this in Beyond the Coloniality of Gender as preparing children for a life of ‘good heterosexual sex’ (this is a paraphrase, I don’t remember the exact quote)

Because sex is a socially constructed category, it is not universal, because social constructs are dependent on the social context they arise in. I’ve read a number of papers from postcolonial/decolonial scholars in particular critiquing this supposed universalism as a form of colonial domination (María Lugones’ Coloniality of Gender, Sally Engle Merry’s Colonial and Postcolonial Law, Boris Bertolt’s The Invention of Homophobia in Africa, Jenny Evang’s Is Gender Ideology Western Colonialism?, B Binaohan’s Decolonising Trans/Gender 101. These last two aren’t postcolonial works but they’re very instructive for understanding sex assignment as a deeply oppressive and non-scientific practice: Heath Fogg Davis’ Sex Classification Policies as Transgender Discrimination: An Intersectional Critique and Toby Beauchamp’s Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and US Surveillance Practices)