Hello Yes This Is Dog

Having F on her birth certificate has not saved her. Systems can still demand further proof of "eligibility." People still refuse to believe her, insisting she is lying, that she is a trans woman, or that she is a man in disguise.

Legal designation does not protect assignment typical cis intersex women from misogyny, intersexism, or transphobic policing of their bodies. It does not prevent them from being publicly scrutinized, accused, and dehumanized when their bodies do not fit expectations.

So when people try to claim that cis intersex women are overwhelmingly supported in their womanhood, understand that this is false. They are asking you to ignore the reality of how quickly society turns on them the moment their bodies do not fit expectations.

Pretending otherwise is propaganda. People use the lives of people like Imane Khelif to push the idea that there is a clean class of people safely exempt from this kind of oppression, that cis intersex women are automatically protected from systemic transmisogyny because they are "really" female on paper.

Being accused of being a man, having your body publicly dissected, and being treated as fraudulent does not stop being that kind of violence just because someone decides you aren't the "right" kind of victim

The moment someone’s body is seen as suspicious, that supposed exemption disappears. They are still subjected to the same suspicion, humiliation, and violence. This reframing uses the same bioessentialist logic TERFS use to selectively define who is even allowed to "count" as a target of misogynistic violence in the first place

Source One is Burchard of Worms' Decretum, Book XIX. The Decretum was a collection of canon laws compiled in the early half of the 11th Century. Book XIX, or The Corrector, was a penitential: basically a guidebook for confessors. Here's a sin, have u done it, here's your penance.

One of the questions for women was, essentially, "Did you make a dildo, strap it to yourself and fuck someone with it?". The original text is in Latin, and there's a few translations floating around of what it said. Here's one, which I spent the past three days looking for, because I wanted a direct source:

Have you done what women are wont to do: to make a certain device in the form of a male member to the measure of your will, and to tie it to your own or another woman's genitals with some ties, and commit fornication with other women, or others with the same instrument, or with another with you? - Translated from Latin, taken from "Die Bussordnungen der abendländischen Kirche nebst einer rechtsgeschichtichen Einleitung", F. W. H Wasserschleben

Pretty cut and dry re: the use of strap-ons. And dildos, because the next question is "and did you use this device on yourself?"

The second source is from the trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer, specifically Female Sodomy: The Trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer (1477) by Helmut Puff, which has an analysis of the trial as well as a translation of the trial texts.

Katherina is the first recorded woman to be executed for homosexuality. There's a lot to be said about her and the way she performed gender but what I'm interested in today is the strap. So, from the court text itself:

...She made an instrument with a red piece of leather, at the front filled with cotton, and a wooden stick stuck into it, and made a hole through the wooden stick, put a string through, and tied it round; and therewith she had her roguery with the two women...

"Maybe not every household needs its own industrial-grade leaf blower."

"Maybe we should accept denser housing and shared infrastructure."

"Maybe private lawns should become community gardens."

all the way to

"You don't get control over your schedule."

"You don't get privacy."

"You don't get to choose your own aesthetics."

"You don't get to decide who has access to your emotional life."

"You don't get to opt out of communal activities."

"You don't get to have tastes that aren't socially approved."

Those are not remotely the same category of thing.

Some people treat all preferences as interchangeable units. They imagine a giant pile labeled "individual desires" and then talk about reducing it by 15%.

But preferences aren't equal.

Wanting three power drills when one shared drill would do is different from wanting control over your schedule.

Wanting a third car is different from wanting a bedroom door that locks.

Wanting a private yacht is different from wanting the ability to listen to music nobody else likes.

Wanting a 10,000-square-foot mansion is different from wanting to spend an evening alone.

The fact that these get lumped together is what makes the discussion so frustrating.

Because someone says, "Well, people will have to make sacrifices."

And I ask, "Okay, what sacrifices?"

And they think I'm being difficult.

No, that's the entire question.

There is a vast difference between "You can't get out-of-season produce on demand, because the resources needed to make that available are unsustainable" and "You can only eat food obtained locally or grown yourself or cooked yourself."

There is a vast difference between "We don't need multiple iterations of the exact same product under different brand names" and "We don't need gluten-free or high-protein or low-fat or vegan or kosher or other specialized food because those things don't' matter."

There is a vast difference between "Fast fashion with oil plastic fabrics made in sweatshops with quasi-slavery conditions needs to be abolished" and "People should only wear handmade bespoke clothing."

There is a vast difference between "Everyone should have the free time and space and resources to pursue hobbies like gardening, canning, cooking, sewing, knitting, and other crafts" and "People should have to rely on small-scale crafting to survive."

During the interaction, one cop left to get a “less than lethal” device “such as a beanbag shotgun,” which are weapons and can permanently disable and kill people. As the ACLU pointed out, they could have left the building when they felt unsafe due to Kayden having a knife; instead, they shot him in the stomach.

He was misgendered repeatedly by his mother, the police, and the news (& had apparently been denied testosterone by a doctor “until his disease [autism] was cured” which contributed to his poor mental health).

"If “man” and “woman” are opposed and mutually exclusive categories, if men can only ever be predators and women can only ever be prey, then trans men can’t exist. We are logically impossible under the terms of the current system. You either “treat us like men” by voiding out half our lives, or you write us back into womanhood by denying our male identities. I knew all that, at least in theory, but when I came out, I actually saw my life story disappearing into other people’s blind spots. I watched myself become unthinkable in real time."

Also these:

"This wasn’t about accountability. This was people tactically forgetting my entire life,including incidents from my life they had personally witnessed or been involved in, so that they could shame me for transitioning. It was bad for me to be a man; if I was a man, I was a bad man, I was all the worst things men are. I was hulking, I was threatening, I was predatory, I was violent."

"I was treated as both genders, but only the most monstrous stereotype of each one."

"The idea that I had always occupied a privileged position within patriarchy was, frankly, untrue; nor did it seem to me that a trans person was any less gender-marginalized than your average cis woman. What privilege I had was conditional, and these books were no guide. Men who wanted to “forge a positive masculinity” (and everyone was very clear that I needed one of those) were encouraged to get in touch with their “feminine sides.” Maybe that was healthy for cis guys, but I had been forced to do feminine things, and present in feminine ways, for the entirety of my young life. Whatever liberation I had achieved came from giving myself permission to stop."

As did the ending:

Folks, if you don't know who Emi Koyama was, you should. Her website (eminism.org, which is a delightful pun) has a ton of her work entirely for free.

You can read the Transfeminist Manifesto in particular here. Emi considered it a historical document and she wrote a very good self-critique in 2008 (included in the document) on the subject of the Manifesto, white feminism, and the lack of inclusion of trans and genderqueer people who aren't trans women. I highly encourage everyone who wants to involve themselves in transfeminism to read her work, not because it is perfect, but because I do think Emi Koyama's Manifesto represents the best intentions for transfeminism: the desire to challenge cissexism, to take activism seriously and compassionately, and a commitment to being open and honest about where we fall short and how we can do better.

I really appreciate this quote from her, which I hadn't seen before, on the subject of feminism needing to "fit in" trans people:

Cis feminists do not own feminism. We don't need to "fit trans people into feminist theory"; we simply need to challenge cissexism in feminist movements and theories. Trans people do not need to be explained by feminist theory; we need to start from the fact that trans people exist and matter.

And it would be a crime to not mention how hard she fought specifically for women of color, to challenge racism and imperialism (white/western and non-white/non-western) in feminist spaces and in general, as well as her intersex activism, and far more. She had such a drive to contribute to, engage with, and push for more and better feminist discourse.