i belong bodily to the earth

Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance.

frequently when i’m out and about with someone walking, they can’t anticipate what path i will take and therefore they’re in my way pretty frequently. this is fine! i can politely ask them to step to the side. but it makes me think about how little non-wheelchair users understand the way wheelchair users move. as someone who used to walk everywhere, it was an adjustment period for me to figure out how to navigate the world in a chair. here are some things that didn’t occur to me so that you don’t cut off your friend right as they’re building momentum to go up a ramp 😆

for context, i use an active manual chair. the world is very different in a power chair. even among active manual chair users, there is a huge diversity in physicality and strategies for getting around. this is a general guide that i think will apply to most manual wheelchair users. i’m starting super basic and getting more complicated as i go.

———

1. manual wheelchairs are a momentum game. it is very easy to maintain speed and direction. but speeding up, slowing down, or turning, is hard. one thing this affects is if we’re on a wavy sidewalk or other twisty-turny walkway, that is a pain in the ass and i am taking as straight a path as i can.

2. wheelchair users also have to pay attention to the slope and condition of the pavement, so our path somewhere will be different than yours, even if we’re taking the same route to the same place. for example, i usually have to go down slopes straight, not diagonally, to avoid tipping over sideways. one area this affects is crosswalks. many intersections have one curb cut for both roads you could cross, which means i will go down curb cuts to a crosswalk as if i am aiming for the middle of the intersection.

your path in orange, mine in blue. to you it seems indirect, but to me it’s the path of least resistance.

i also will be building speed in the second half of the crosswalk. this is a much easier way to tackle a ramp. if i approach with momentum, i won’t have to drag myself up the slope once i get to it.

3. building momentum and maintaining it is only half of the job. the other half is stopping. manual wheelchairs cannot stop on a dime if they’re moving with any kind of speed. if i tried to stop immediately when going downhill, i would fly out of the chair. so don’t walk right into the path of a wheelchair in motion and then stop! i will have to turn to the side very quickly and hope i don’t tip. i can’t tell you how often parents pushing strollers will stop their stroller directly in my path and then get offended when i am alarmed and turn sharply to avoid hitting their child. from their perspective, i was being careless and going “too fast.” in reality, normal walking speed takes a few feet to slow down from and stop.

4. in terms of slope. see this street in san francisco?

i can’t go down this street, it’s way too steep. i would give myself friction burns on my palms trying to control my speed. if i was in a situation where there was no avoiding this street, like in an emergency, i would be breaking my straight-slope rule and zig-zagging in the middle of the road.

this would require several zig-zags back and forth, more than the four that i drew. i also could not go up this road other than with this method. up or down, i risk tipping over sideways if i’m not careful.

4. in a similar vein, consider terrain. slopes with grass or carpet take huge amounts of energy to get up. this grassy hill isn’t insurmountable, but it would take me like thirty minutes to get up there. honestly i would probably go backwards, because it’s easier to pull yourself up a slope than push yourself.

other types of terrain can be completely immobilizing, though. this decorative gravel pathway is beautiful, and inaccessible to me. my casters (front wheels) simply will not go through that.

5. in terms of walkways and obstacles. if there’s a deep gap in the pavement lined up the way i’m going, and it’s, say, an inch wide, that is an obstacle for me. my casters are one inch wide, and my back wheels are an inch and a half. i’ll get stuck in it like a train on a track.

i have to straddle this, even if it means being too close to the middle of the sidewalk and preventing us from walking side by side.

similarly, if a crack is greater than an inch high, i’m gonna wheelie over it. at two inches, i have to. a wheelie may require a change in speed, either faster or slower depending on the person.

i have 4 inch casters, so a lip as little as 2 inches will stop me in my tracks. a lip as little as one inch, hit with any speed, can knock my casters out of square. casters can get knocked out of alignment pretty easily depending on the chair. i’d rather not have to pull out an allen wrench and a level, so i’m gonna wheelie.

this happened when i hit about a 1.5” lip on a pavement crack when i was going downhill at maybe 3mph.

6. putting it all together. see how diagonal this crack is?

this is another situation where i have to go straight relative to the slope. because that crack is wide, it will probably also require a wheelie. if i tried to approach that straight relative to the sidewalk, my left caster would get up the slope, i’d wheelie, then my right caster would land in the crack. i have to go this way.

(also lol at the trash can blocking the curb cut)

When the majority of violence and sexual assaults committed against trans people is directed at trans women, that is not transphobia—it is trans-misogyny.

I think it is important to understand that for many trans women, Whipping Girl is formative. It is hard to overstate how important of a work it is to how trans femme people as a whole understand and view the world. With that in mind.

That quote is predicated on a false assumption. The best current data is that violence is directed across trans gender identities fairly equally. That is, trans men and non binary people suffer about as much violence as trans women. However, up until recently almost all studies of violence against trans people have been focused on trans women. Trans men and nonbinary people have been critically under represented and violence against them critically unreported. And yet many trans women continue to assume that trans women are the most targeted gender identity, largely because of an over reliance on a twenty year old manifesto that made a very strong claim based on bad data (which was the best data available at the time).

This is not a Julia Serano hit piece. I think Whipping Girl is fine. But I also think that Whipping Girl is not perfect. There are ideas and statements I personally disagree with. There are ideas and statements in there that are objectively wrong, like the above quote. And there is a least one statement I simply find indefensible.

While trans people on the female-to-male (FTM) spectrum face discrimination for breaking gender norms (i.e., oppositional sexism), their expressions of maleness or masculinity themselves are not targeted for ridicule—to do so would require one to question masculinity itself.

This statement does not line up with what I have observed. I have observed trans men's masculinity being ridiculed, though not in the same way as trans women's femininity is ridiculed. She is wrong. I think this is an ignorant statement made by a trans woman motivated to overlook discrimination because she was pushing a particular narrative and therefore failed to recognize discrimination as it is experienced by another group, assuming that because it is not like the discrimination she experiences it does not exist. I believe this statement is indefensible. It was ignorant then, it is ignorant now.

Again, this is not a hit piece. I don't think she is a bad person, I don't think we need to throw out all of Whipping Girl. Lots of people make mistakes like this, it is an occupational hazard of making these kind of strong theories and statements.

But how many trans women take this statement as gospel and build their understanding of trans masculinity around Julia Serano's dismissive, factually incorrect, and at times even ignorant statements?

And this is Julia Serano's Whipping Girl. One of the most respected trans feminine texts there is. If we should be able to trust any text, it is Whipping Girl.

And that's the point. It is dangerous to view these sorts of texts as objective sources of information. And it's not just trans women and whipping girl, I am just most familiar with texts relating to trans women because I am one.

The queer community has a problem where we view authority figures in the movement as sources of objectively correct information. And when you do this eventually some authority figure you respect is going to say something that's ignorant and wrong and you will adopt that incorrect idea.

So the hrc bases a lot of their claims on identified homicide numbers. Which, of course, introduces massive selective bias. Using a pool of 372 identified trans victims of homicide, the hrc claims that 83% of trans victims of homicide were women.

The problem being that identified victims are not the same as all victims. Especially when you are comparing a known highly visible demographic to demographics known for low visibility.

The discrepancy in those claims is subtle to those who are not trained in data analysis, but it is such a basic and major error as to call into question the ability of the HRC to do effective data analysis at all. It's classic survivorship bias, I'm sure you've seen the story of the WW2 planes with bullet holes, it's that sort of thing.

And it is true that all sources agree that trans women (especially black trans women) are far more often identified. We have more names of murdered trans women than other demographics. You might be forgiven thinking this means trans women suffer the most violence.

But competent data analysis paints a different picture.

Lets look at "Global Burden of Violence Against Transgender and Gender-Diverse Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis".

The first thing you will notice is that this source spends a huge amount of time going into exact methodology, what data was used, the source, what data was not used and why, and how and why it was analyzed in the way it was. This is what competent data analysis looks like. Lets pull some critical quotes from the source:

"Disproportionate violence burdens are experienced by transgender and gender-diverse people who are multiply marginalized.13 For example, transphobia, racism, and classism intersect to compound violence exposure for transgender women of color.14,15 According to the Trans Murder Monitoring project, 94% of the 321 identified transgender and gender-diverse people who were murdered in 2023 were transgender women or transgender feminine people, and the majority were Black, women of color, and engaged in sex work.16 Such disparities suggest the importance of considering intersecting identities in violence research and intervention strategies.13"

You will notice they acknowledge the data on identified victims is almost entirely trans women. What they do not do is suggest that this means trans women are the primary victims of anti trans violence, instead drawing the conclusion that intersecting identities are a key factor. This is important because of the results of the actual data of properly conducted data gathering. Here is their conclusion about violence across trans gender identities: "Our meta-analyses did not show significantly different levels of violence globally among transgender women, transgender men, and nonbinary adults."

"While we would have included homicide, we identified no studies that reported its prevalence." The first part is pretty plain. There is not a statistically significant difference in violence levels between trans identities, according to the data that was collected in a scientific manner.

However, homicide data has been completely neglected to be collected in a scientific manner (likely due to the difficulty of doing so). Instead reports are anecdotal - that is, we identify trans homicide victims after the fact, which means it is entirely based on demographic visibility. The source does suggest that it seems likely that black trans women in particular are disproportional victims of homicide, but no real conclusion can be drawn without further studies.

Given that general violence against trans people seems fairly flat across identity, and that intersectional factors seem to play a critical part in violence against trans people, I would suggest that anecdotally gathered evidence is the source of the discrepancy. Between a demographic known for hyper visibility (trans women), and demographics known for being practically invisible (other trans identities), it draws a very obvious picture of why the anecdotal evidence looks the way it does.

As a side note and purely my own opinion, I think there is a tendency for white trans women to claim the violence experienced by trans women of color, especially black trans women, and report it as general violence against trans women. But the data suggests that race (and class, which are often intertwined) play such a massive role in violence against trans women that I feel it is honestly kind of racist how the trans women community so often glosses over it, if it is even discussed at all. The simple fact is that a white trans woman like myself is much, much less likely to experience violence than a black trans woman, and that is a key part of the discussion.

Getting back to data, there is one more important piece I want to highlight. Specifically, how data has been gathered, and on who.

"Of the 94 studies, nearly all (90 studies [96%]) included transgender women, whereas 49% (46 studies) included transgender men, and 37% (35 studies) included nonbinary adults"

This is a massive discrepancy in visibility. It seems almost laughable that a study would include trans women specifically but not bother with trans men, a staggering display of systematic bias against trans men, and yet it appears that half of available studies that passed the minimum bar of quality to be included in the meta analysis did just that. And nonbinary people have it even worse. It is no wonder that violence against trans demographics other than trans women is less well understood and under reported in anecdotal analysis. Even the people actively looking for violence against trans people are heavily biasing their studies towards discovering violence against trans women.

I could go on for a long, long time breaking down this one meta analysis, but I think you get the point, and in particular how important proper data analysis is. The simple fact of the matter is many "reputable" sources are clearly not conducting proper data analysis when breaking down anti trans violence by demographic and making wildly incorrect claims because of it.

I have one more source I will be brief with. "Gender Identity Disparities in Criminal Victimization: National Crime Victimization Survey, 2017–2018". The critical quote for our purpose:

"Transgender women and men had higher rates of violent victimization (86.1 and 107.5 per 1000 persons, respectively) than did cisgender women (23.7 per 1000 persons; OR = 3.88; 90% CI = 0, 8.55) and cisgender men (19.8 per 1000 persons; OR = 5.98, 90% CI = 2.09, 9.87), but there were no differences between transgender men and women (Δ = 21.4; SE = 68.7; P = .76)."

You will note that the raw data shows higher violence against trans men, but with proper data analysis it is revealed to not be statistically significant. This is something you have to be careful of, there are tools experts use for data analysis that reveal that obvious conclusions from raw numbers are not always correct.

There are more sources out there, but I am not going to bother tracking them down. It was not hard to find these sources, these two major sources I found through simple internet searches on the first page (duck duck go, in my case). I don't know why you had problems, for me it was as simple as searching for something like "trans violence by gender identity" and looking for actual studies that talk about methodology.

No access info for any of the venues

Box office is inaccessible

Google “[festival name] accessibility”; get info on their “accessible pricing” (pay £1 less if you want to). No mention of free tickets for essential carers

Do a lot of disability detective work; most venues don’t have wheelchair access

One claims to be accessible, look inside: “we’re an accessible venue. There are three steps to get in, but we can help you with those”.

“Everybody welcome*”

The ramparts of Mount Erebus. Ross Island near Antarctica during the Terra Nova expedition, 1911.

Over 500 years spent trying to cut down a whole trunk of human culture.

Some people ARE sicker than you. Some people are going to die a lot quicker than you due to their conditions. That’s who I’m talking about when I say “I’m going to have to watch more of my friends die”. I don’t mean “because they can’t afford it”. I mean because their body is going to shut down, and it is going to die.

I am talking being in need of organ transplants and trying to live through myasthenic crisis in an ICU. It’s not the same thing as “if I don’t have access to payment for my treatment, I’ll die”. It’s “even with treatment, I’m very likely going to die.” and I need you to understand that.

yes, i also have a lot of crazy ideas that i believe and i see and hear things that aren't there and sometimes i start freaking out because i think someone close to me died when they're perfectly fine or that someone's coming to kill me or that my pets have been replaced with alien creatures, but i'm also a person with a life and a childhood and friends and i am not a threat to anyone.

and i'm here. on tumblr. on youtube. in real life. i can see and hear what everyone says about people like me. and i'm fucking tired of it.

Treat everyone like a person. Especially people with schizophrenia, hallucinations, delusions, or psychosis, who are all dehumanized and stripped of their legal rights far, far more easily than almost any other class of person (at least in the West, and especially in the US, where police regularly kill unarmed people with schizophrenia, psychosis, and other mental health disorders).

Polar bear (Ursus maritimus) cubs at Kaktovik in Alaska, U.S.