Doink!

I appreciate your tags but like, please don’t do this.

Cis women being transphobic to trans men isn’t Just Transphobia™. Cis women target trans men specifically, because they know they can get away with it in more spaces.

A cis woman being transphobic toward trans women, or trans people in general, is going to be seen as a transphobe. They’ll likely, and rightfully be criticized and/or ostracized from certain spaces because of it- especially in most feminist circles. If they want to be a part of mainstream, non-TERFy feminism, they’re gonna have to meet some bare minimum behavior expectations where that’s concerned.

But when cis women are transphobic to trans men, most people won’t even notice it’s transphobia at all. Plenty of people will even cheer them on:

Trans men get acne and oily skin on T? Men are so nasty! Trans men have bottom dysphoria? Lol, just like a man to be insecure about his penis! Transmascs face the highest rates of lifetime sexual assault out of every gender and we’d like that addressed? Men are so whiny and fragile! Fight the patriarchy!

They’re women! They’re feminists! when they say horrible, violent, stomach-churning, bigoted shit about trans men, they’re just railing against their own oppressors. It’s justice!

There are so many more insidious forms of this, too.

Cis women who fetishize us as small, soft, effeminite versions of “real men” are still seen as “trans allies”. It sounds so positive; who wouldn’t want to be seen as inherently sweet, safe, and pretty? Who wouldn’t want to be grossly othered and fetishized for qualities we are stereotyped to have? Surely not the men who already have to fight tooth and nail to define our own relationships with masculinity and manhood.

Cis women who infantilize us and try to revoke our autonomy are seen as “allies”, because they’re only trying to protect us!

Cis women who quietly refuse make reproductive healthcare more inclusive, who go on making that fight about Women’s Bodies, who continue to say things like “men can’t understand misogyny” and include trans men in their “kill all men” jokes… well, they’re just affirming our genders!

Why would trans men want equal access to healthcare? Why would trans men want our suffering acknowledged? Why would trans men, the group with about a 50% rate of attempted suicide, not want to be told that everyone else would prefer we were dead?

Feminism!

This isn’t even touching on the very intentional predation of trans men by cis women. Trans men and transmascs are targeted by cis lesbians in particular for corrective rape, and by abusive cis women as “easy targets” due to the lack of support networks, resources, and community for trans men and transmascs.

These things are said and done by cis women who tout themselves as “trans allies”. These are women who share those “share to make a TERF mad” posts and call themselves “TERF destroyers”. These are women who say “trans women are women”. These are women in your spaces, and in your community. They’re people you follow and admire. They’re even people I follow and admire; women I’ve followed for years have called me a misogynist for pointing out the problems in things like “men can’t know what it’s like to be expected to have children”.

Sometimes it gets sad, though.

It was my first walkthrough of the night when I saw the girl weeping beside the grave. It happens sometimes, and I never chase them. The cemetary is for the dead and the grieving. They’re always welcome here.

I went over to her, careful to keep the grave between us so I wouldn’t scare her. “What’s the matter?” I asked gently. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

She shook her head, still weeping. “No-one came to my funeral,” she sobbed. “No-one at all.”

I checked the stone. She’d been about seventeen. An age of strong emotions and fierce resentments. “I’m sorry,” I told her, and meant it. “That’s… always hard.”

“If they cared about me, they would have come,” she wept. “This means nobody cared at all.”

“Not always,” I told her gently. “Sometimes it means that something else happened. If you like, I can try to find out.”

“Really?” She wiped her eyes. “I’d… I’d appreciate that. I’m Lucy.”

“Stanley.” She couldn’t shake hands, so I gave her a friendly nod. “Come with me, Lucy. I’ve got a laptop in the watchman’s hut.”

She followed me, drifting silently, back to the hut. I brought her in, and made two cups of tea, offering her one. “I’m not solid,” she said, her lip quivering. “I can’t -“

I showed her how to take it, the ghostly echo of the solid cup, and told her I’d learned it from the day attendant over at the columbarium. She’s Korean, and knows a lot about hungry ghosts. She sipped her tea while I opened the laptop and ran the usual searches.

I do this a lot.

Sure enough, there’d been three major car accidents between the area she’d lived in and the cemetary. There’s almost always at least one - there’s this one intersection that no exorcism, ritual purification or cleansing spell has ever worked on - and it usually helps. A lot of spirits want to know why someone they loved didn’t come.

A Worker Reads History Bertolt Brecht

I was at the ROM, about six years ago, at a special exhibit on Babylon. And there was a brick, formerly part of a palace. And Nebuchadnezzar, the one who built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, had had his name in cuneiform stamped on every single brick, to emphasize that he had built it.

I know we all love the ‘humans are space orcs’ concept… but imagine, onboard the new ship they’ve been assigned to, the human meets an actual space orc. A massive monster… fangs and tusks and scars and a battle-hardened stare, looming over all the other life forms on the ship in its thick indestructible armour it refuses to remove. It barely drinks, it doesn’t need sleep, its massive shoulders are heavy with the terrible things it has experienced. Compared to the squishy & delicate human body, this thing is a walking tank.

… Except instead of hating/ignoring one another, the human and the monster start bonding over both coming from death planets. The human is excited to find a life form who doesn’t quiver with fear at the vague description of a jellyfish and the monster is ecstatic to meet someone who understands the feeling of being bitten by a qua’lem (cats are pretty close). They sit together and compare dangerous animals and locations as the other aliens look on in confusion and fear… oh, you also have dense jungles of deadly hidden predators, boiling acid lakes, tamed predatory killers, and areas with horrendously high and low temperatures? Sick!! 

It doesn’t take long before the two of them become totally inseparable. The human loves not feeling like some kind of crazy outsider and the monster is overjoyed they’ve finally found an equal in this unkillable marshmallow.

Women (and many men) fought for decades with hospitals to even have men allowed in the delivery room during the early stages of labor, which can last for several hours, and hospitals only began to give in to their requests in the 1960s but even then they would be kicked out of the room by hospital staff before the actual birth took place. So many of the couples watching the show would have had to go through labor without having/being allowed to support their spouse regardless of their wishes. Having the child’s father present for the birth only began to happen in the 1970s and 1980s. Which means most people watching this show either went through birth without the support of their spouse, were not allowed to support their spouse during the birth of their child, or their own mother’s went through that during their birth.

Moreover, a lot of kids watched this show. MLK himself contacted Nichelle Nichols and asked her to stay on the show when she was considering leaving, because “you don’t have a Black role, you have an equal role,” and there wasnt many Black role models on tv. I can only imagine how Black kids, Asian kids, and mixed race or mixed culture kids felt seeing people like them on tv. Hell, seeing Uhura on screen is what inspired Whoopi Goldberg as a little girl.

Like, all the years of anti-Chinese racism in the US? Sulu. Anti-Japanese sentiments left over after WW2? Sulu. Korean War in 1950-52? Sulu. The Vietnam War, with Johnson in 1965 (a year before TOS started airing) choosing to start sending American troops into the conflict? Sulu.

Sulu was Roddenberry’s desperate attempt to show all Asian people as inherently worthy, inherently human, and yeah, he probably put kind of too much on Sulu’s shoulders, but it was the 1960s and Roddenberry fucking cared about representation, so he did what he could.

Scotty was third in line for the captain’s chair. The only non-Kirk who had the con more then him was Spock.

He was smart, he was a *ranked* crewmen, he was a gentleman, he wasn’t a skirt chaser, and he was capitol L loyal. The only time he got into a fight was when someone both went after his Captain, AND his Ship.

And he was Scottish. 

Also, it’s very worth noting that the “token minority character” label doesn’t apply in any way to these characters.

Flash Comics #13 - “The Creeps” (1941)

Like, compare this post by tumblr user wufflesvetinari, which makes an important point about Tolkien’s worldbuilding, and also lives in my head rent free:

and then these quotes from Jacob Geller’s “Every Zelda is the Darkest Zelda”

and his conclusions about the messages in Zelda games are thematically very similar to the through-lines about friendship and love in LOTR, and what a lot of authors miss about what makes a fantasy story personal and memorable:

The residents and servants knew which floorboards made a sound and avoided them. But a burglar, or assassin didn’t. If you heard the creaking of floorboards, you knew danger was coming.

But no one seems to have pointed out his other big role. His range, he has range! His other big role?

He voices Paarthurnax from fucking Skyrim and it’s amazing.

maggots in the trash can? calm down. clean it up. free bird food.

nasty porn? calm down. scroll past. shrug it off.

assholes leaning on dehumanizing rhetoric to get away with hateful behavior: calm down. think about why they want you so shook up.

when you’re disgusted, you’re reacting. you’re not thinking. you don’t wonder things, you don’t plan, you don’t learn anything. you just wince away, stomp the bug, ban the books, bully the freak.

decay is a form of life. rot is inherent in the act of creation. things are made into other things. corpses become flies become corpses. filth is its own intricate ecosystem. things that are gross have an inherent worth and dignity.

 But if you ask people who think about things, the answer is vague. Killing a hibernating bear would just feel… impolite? You can’t fucking shoot a man when he’s sleeping, that’s just fucking rude. It’s just not the right thing to do.

 Long before hunting laws were established in Finland, you couldn’t kill a sleeping bear, and what commands you is something older than law: tradition. Even at a time when hunting was a matter of life and death, and a bear fighting for its life is mainly a matter of death, you just didn’t kill a hibernating bear, you have to wake it up first. Hunters risked their lives, the lives of their brothers and everyone in the hunting party, who were friends, family and men that they loved, to give the bear a fighting chance.

 In the modern time, the hunting season of bears is in the summer, for the warmest summer months. There are many reasons for why they are allowed to tread safely in autumn and to sleep in peace through the cold months, almost all of which are rational and scientific, and do not touch the old traditions.

 Old faith says a living thing has many souls - henki, luonto, itse. Plants only have one - the one that wills them to grow. Animals have two, both the spark of life and nature that enables them to act. A human being also has the third, one that makes them a person, personality, itse, literally “self”. But the soul that travels in your dreams is not the soul that defines a human - animals have that one as well. When your dog runs in her sleep, her soul is elsewhere, where a dog is needed.