soldier for hire

guy who only experienced torture: i don't like this because it's too unlike the torture

Hey, if you’re disabled (of any kind), Mad/Insane, or “undiagnosed but there’s definitely something happening”, please come read this.

Especially if you’re a disabled transfemme. I know that as of writing, we’ve had a shitty couple days.

And if y’all can share it otherwise, whether that’s reblogging this or sending the link to the disabled/mad/whatever we are people in your life, I’d really appreciate it.

for all the disabled and Mad people who like listening to me, you need to read this too. seriously, it's. necessary.

78 years of forced displacement, restricted aid and unimaginable violence against the Palestinians. It is still ongoing to this day. How much longer can this go on? Until we reach the 79th year? The 80th?

At the same time, The Toronto Palestine Film Festival hosted an event to commemorate the Nakba. It starts with a documentary directed by Mai Masri called, "Frontiers of Dreams and Fears". The film is about two girls, Manar and Mona, who develop a friendship by exchanging letters after Southern Lebanon is liberated from the Zionist occupation in the 2000. Even though they are separated by the border, a wired barricade, their love and companionship is felt in their words across papers. 26 years later, Lebanon is under attack by the Zionist occupation. [BBC reports: "Lebanon's health ministry says the number of people killed in the country by ['Israeli'] strikes during the conflict between ['Israel'] and Hezbollah, which escalated at the beginning of March, has surpassed 3,000. It put the death toll at 3,020 on Monday, a grim milestone in the fighting that shows no sign of abating despite a fragile ceasefire"].

As the film ends, a keynote speaker is present. It is no other than Mouin Rabbani: He is a a researcher, analyst, and commentator specializing in Palestinian affairs, the Arab-['Israeli'] conflict, and contemporary ['Middle East'] issues at the ['Middle East'] at the Council on Global Affairs. He starts with a speech about the Nakba, detailing the horrors Palestinians have gone through, then finishes with a reassurance of their resilience and resistance.  

This makes me think about the many people risking their lives to fight against oppression and occupation! They are throwing rocks at tanks and snipers, boycotting products and protesting in the streets and fighting for their land ownership in courts. It begs the question: What are we doing in the West? We should join our Palestinian and Lebanese comrades, of course! Continue to boycott, donate and protest!

Please consider helping my friend, Suad (@stillwritingtoday). She is a computer engineer from North Ghazzah and she is a mother to an 1 year old child who is ill with allergies and infections. Suad is caring for older relatives, such as her in-laws and her grandparents! She needs to purchase medicine, clothing, food, fuel, supplies, and other essentials!

Her fundraiser is #279 in the vetted fundraisers' spreadsheet by @/el-shab-hussein and @/nabulsi. @/nabulsi has written posts for Suad, with the latest update here.

Please donate here. / Donation Match.

He didn't do it.

The cops very clearly planted evidence on him because they had to make an arrest because all eyes were on them and whoever actually did the deed was making them look stupid.

Why would the real killer hero have kept the weapon on his person and traveled two states over while carrying it and a manifesto in his bag, conveniently turning the crime into a federal matter? The same guy whose bag they found in a park, filled with monopoly money? Why did the police turn off their bodycams, take Luigi's stuff, drive a block away, turn their bodycams back on, go back into the restaurant, and then arrest him?

Looking at the material evidence, it is plainly apparent that trans women are women proper - we are forced into the same spheres of labor as other women within our classes. Most of us are trapped in low-wage (often highly feminized) work, or are forced out of the formal legal economy and into sex work, long-term unemployment and begging just to afford food, and so on. As with cis women, a small number of us (mostly limited to the imperial core) are professionals who can access higher education, well-paying jobs, and so on. We can see plainly that, when all other factors are equal, trans women make markedly less money through employment than do cis women, cis men, and also trans men, which is consistent with and easily explained by our real existence as a type of specially-exploited woman, the same way a Black woman will typically make less than a white woman, a periphery woman less than an imperial core woman, and so on. We are just another kind of woman with an added layer of special exploitation, and one which is not incompatible with any other such layer.

On the other hand, we can look at the way we are spoken of and commonly regarded in normal social life. It seems plainly apparent that many people, maybe even most people, do indeed regard us as a third sex even if they would not use that term. Cis women, for the most part, do not get they/themmed incessantly the same way we do when someone is aware of our trans status. We're totally unwelcome in sexed spaces (bathrooms, changing rooms, etc), on a bio-physical level we are regarded as alien or as if we function completely differently from a cis woman or a cis man (despite HRT making us bio-physically extremely similar to cis women, and extremely different from cis men. The vast majority of trans women are either on HRT or desire to be on it). Even bourgeois trans women, take for instance the US politician Sarah McBride, are regarded with so much distaste and hatred by other bourgeois women. A phenomenon I've observed repeatedly in my own life is that when in public, strangers will consistently and exclusively address me as female, as a woman, with she/her, up until I have to share my ID (as part of getting a job, to access medical care, to buy alcohol, etc) - I have been unable to get the sex marker on my ID changed, and as soon as a stranger notices that, it's immediately apparent that I instantly become something "other" to them, something unknown and foreign and scary, and they don't really know what to do about it and usually refer to me very minimally or with they/them for the remaining duration of the interaction. There are countless other such phenomena we can raise to provide evidence for the fact that we seem to be regarded as a third sex, but I'll end there.

What's happening here? On a material level, trans women are simply women proper, but on an ideological level, trans women seem to be widely understood as a third sex. Much to the distaste of those attempting to carry out a metaphysical analysis, this is a contradictory state of affairs - the reality as it exists within the financial statistics and within the medical journals and in a visit with a client is distinct from the reality that exists within people's heads, in the realm of the ideal. We can attempt to pick one side or the other and say that it is the truth of transfeminine existence, but I see this as a mistake. Rather, I think it is much more coherent to regard the true nature of transfeminine existence as this contradiction, as the class of people who are truly women on every material level but who are also widely regarded as something separate from and foreign to womanhood even at the same time as those same people regarding us as such produce the conditions that create our special-exploitation as just another underclass of women.

For the most part, this is not done with conscious intent, but rather, it's the natural cross product of the general conditions of capitalism and class society, the current ideological and material formation of patriarchy, and the specific neuroses non-transmisogynized people hold about trans women in the context of these greater systems.

The same way the proletariat is defined by its contradiction with the bourgeoisie rather than as something with independent existence, our nature as trans women is defined by contradiction to both men and cis women on a material level but also on an ideological level the very concept of a "cis" woman - the idea that women are not a socially constructed category but are instead something natural, immutable, in possession of existence separate from class society and patriarchy in particular. Or, to put it another way, trans women are defined as the class of women violating the perfect Platonic forms of patriarchy as people imagine them.

like, it doesn't particularly matter what mechanisms of socialization you think are the root cause of her behaviors, and it really doesn't matter what her upbringing actually looked like or where she's at in unpacking how it affected her

this is obviously not how privilege works--a woman cannot access male privilege by simply acting the way men are encouraged to act. that is exactly why she doesn't have male privilege, because what is rewarded in men is punished in women. a trans woman and a cis woman alike can both be loudmouths, but both will be punished for it, because neither occupy the social class that men do