Horde of Shiny Things

this just arrived in the mail today

have you ever actually watched anything around pregnancy and giving birth??? Like, even so much as a 5 second audio from the process. The amount of physical trauma it carries out on the body and leaves is genuinely the subject of several horror movies. You’ll notice I haven’t even gone into specifics with this post because I’m half-convinced tumblr would ban me.

anyway I’m making this post because with the state of discourse on this site, I’m firmly convinced that if it were the other way around, and the current group of transgender and loudly transandrophobic shitheads were the ones facing the prospect of giving birth, and all the complications that come with it, and all the insanely high risk of fucking dying, and all the political climate that designates anyone with a functioning womb as a fucking incubator, and just the sheer pain and trauma of it alone, we’d never hear the end of it.

again, I cannot restate my point enough that it’s awful that people are forcibly sterilised or put through other forms of reproductive abuse that does not involve pregnancy or giving birth. This should not happen, and should be a part of the conversation around reproductive autonomy within the trans community.

Whatever it was, to put it this way, if there were 10 studies on the trans community as a whole, there were 3 on trans women and trans fems and 0 on trans men and trans mascs, and 0 on nonbinary people. All of the mixed studies were also pretty much useless for my purposes as well because they were all so lopsided.

I think I swapped to a bunch of different things - addiction rates, smoking, depression, mental health in general - nothing that was even roughly equal in looking at all of us. Trans men, trans mascs and nonbinary people are so under researched as to be nonexistent.

The Amur Leopard and Clouded Leopard (which recently celebrated its 50th cub born at the zoo!)

The Sumatran Tiger

The Red Ruffed Lemur and Ring-Tailed Lemur

The Cotton-Top Tamarin and White-Cheeked Gibbon

The Colobus Monkey and De Brazza’s Monkey

And the Mexican Spider Monkey!

You have something wrong with you. No, not something we can do anything about. You're just Wrong. Not wrong enough that you can't work, but too wrong to be able to help you.

You don't need medication to mitigate your suffering. You're the only cause of your suffering. The fact that you can look me in the eyes long enough to tell me what's wrong means you're not autistic (a real problem with real consequences, unlike yours). You're not looking at me. This means you are avoidant. This means you just need to stop avoiding things. It's all in your head. But a psychiatrist can't help you.

You just told me a side effect of your new medication. However, I am unfamiliar with all but the most common of side effects, and it's not one of them. You must be lying to me about how you feel when you take it.

There's no point in trying to help someone who doesn't want to help themselves.

You keep asking for disability benefits because you've been unable to work for over a decade. It's too early to give you that. What if you stop trying to get better as soon as you're not in constant economic stress? A diagnosis would just confirm to you that you can't do it.

to help someone who doesn’t

want to help themselves.

To our dismay, the artist and author Marjane Satrapi has passed away.

As she wrote, ordinary Americans and Iranians have more in common with each other than we do with either of our governments, which have far too much in common with each other.

I watched it happen, guys. I was subscribed to Anita Sarkeesian at the time and I watched this play out all the way from the early days to Trump's election.

The MRA movement is a reactionary and anti-feminist movement that uses a grain of truth- that patriarchy negatively affects cis men- as a starting point on a radicalization pipeline to turn people against feminism by blaming feminism for the problems cis men face. Note that I specify cis for a very simple yet important reason: MRAs hate trans men. They do not see trans men as men at all, but as sick little girls who are trying to infiltrate their no-girls-allowed club. This is another strike against the "transmasc activists are just like MRAs" theory, but I am getting ahead of myself.

MRAs reject the idea that we live in a patriarchy at all; in fact, they think we live in a matriarchy. This can't be overstated. Every negative side effect patriarchy has for cis men, they think was caused not by male dominance in society, but by feminism/women. If you ask an MRA, the lack of shelters for male victims of domestic violence isn't due to it being seen as weak and unmanly to be a male DV victim (and thus men refuse to fund them) but because women won't allow it to happen. They take a single true incident that happened decades ago- a woman trying to open a DV shelter for men, being harassed by feminists for years, and eventually becoming an antifeminist herself because of it- as proof that this still happens and is the cause of the issue.

They believe no-fault divorce harms cis men and cis men alone, and also that cis men rarely get custody of their children in divorces, and this is a result of men being discriminated against (usually due to false accusations of rape or abuse). This is despite studies showing that when men actually fight for custody, they win the majority of the time; further, despite the hand-wringing about false accusations of abuse to win custody battles, studies have found that accusations of abuse, even fully substantiated ones, make it more likely for fathers to gain some level of custody rather than less likely. Abusive fathers are more likely to get custody than non-abusive fathers.

And of course, MRAs are, more than any real-world issue, preoccupied unhealthily with the idea that some things should just not be for women. Video games are only for women if they're okay with being harassed and objectified, and if they never criticize the quality of female and queer representation in gaming, because video games were for men first. And they're definitely not for women who make games for women. Anita Sarkeesian was targeted by GamerGate (which was an MRA movement before it was a wider alt-right movement) because she dared to criticize the antifeminist approaches of a lot of games. And Zoe Quinn, of course, was targeted based on false allegations from their ex-boyfriend that they were dating one of the reviewers of their game, which, it merits mentioning, was a free game, so it didn't even matter if the game averaged a 10/10 or a 4/10 on Metacritic. (If there's one thing MRAs really hate, it's people they perceive as women sleeping with men who aren't them).

MRAs also don't like when women writers are given too much attention, and they really, really, really don't like female referees and coaches being allowed in the NBA or NFL.

MRAs aren't pro-man, they're anti woman.

Now let's compare this to transmasc advocates, the so-called transMRAs.

First of all, let's remember that MRAs hate trans men and see them as mentally ill girls trying to violently invade "their" space and psyop them into liking women and woke shit.

Transmasc advocates, in stark contrast to MRAs, universally align themselves with feminists and trans rights activism. They acknowledge the patriarchy as the root of transphobia and misogyny.

In stark contrast to MRAs, who pretend to care about issues affecting them as an excuse to push for the abolition of feminism, transmasc advocates care about trans issues and know they are the exact reason why feminism is needed. Transmsac advocates know that transphobia and misogyny both have the same source. And in fact, transmasc advocates don't blame transfemmes for ANY of the systemic issues transmascs face- they only object to transfemmes who spout misogynistic, transphobic, and/or transandrophobic talking points.

Transmascs fight the patriarchy in order to improve the situation for trans people and those affected by misogyny (including those affected by transandrophobia). MRAs fight feminism in order to bolster cis male dominance. Transmascs want to end cispatriarchy, while MRAs want to end feminism. Transmascs have been affected by misogyny, while MRAs inflict misogyny on others.