We serve art here, Sir.

Ideas in the 1920s: We should make a new kind of plastic you can eat

Ideas in the 1960s: We should invent a new and more civil racism

Ideas in the 1980s: What if you could have sex with Hello World

Ideas in the 1990s: What if cars had TVs in them

Ideas in the 2000s: Is it gay to wash your hair?

Ideas in the 2010s: What if a refrigerator was made of goo

and like. i also don't want to downplay why people would feel like that. you spend your entire life suffering because of being denied your gender. it impacts your identity and your relationships and your work and your everything. and then when there's finally a chance that you may actually be able to cross the great divide that separates the group you are forced to be to and the group you have always felt you belonged in, there is all of this talk about how we should dismantle the groups entirely, when you have barely - if at all - gotten a chance to even exist in a way that doesn't make you want to kill yourself, when the groups are still influencing everything about the world all the time.

but the thing is! we feel this way primarily because in our present culture, to be gendered as cis-binary is to be made human. it is to socially exist, to be seen, to be loved, to have existential, ontological meaning as a person. and nonbinary people do not get to pursue gender euphoria that also makes us human, you understand? nb/gq/gnc people do not have the option of pursuing being socially recognized as you truly feel you are and not wanting to kill yourself. some people can be happy on either side of the chasm and carve out space for themselves there, but too often only on the precarious edge. and the rest of us can only jump off or wait to be shoved off.

do you understand? we don't have the option. our insistence on fighting and deconstructing the binary is not an abstract political choice based on what we speculate would be the most #radical. it is as much a choice made out of trans survival as any binary trans man or woman's pursuit of a passing and stealth life. and plenty of us also do not want the concept of "man" or "woman" to be erased entirely; many of nb/gq/gnc people are men and women! sometimes both at the same time! others want to see new concepts to gain acceptance and social recognition!

> “I’M GONNA GET HIM PREGNANT!”/“the boy impregnator”/anything similar where the joke is that the idea of a pregnant man is absurd, impossible, or outside of the realm of reality.

> Pregnant man emoji reactions to Discord messages.

> Commenting on the pregnancies of real men with anything about ao3, fanfiction, or omegaverse.

Jewish baby named Edgardo Mortara is seemingly about to die in Bologna, 1851

Catholic nanny secretly baptises him to save his soul, which she’s not exactly the kind of authority who can do that, but w/e, it’s interpreted by the church as valid later

Kid survives

1857 her secret gets out, a baptising makes a kid a Catholic according to the Church and a Catholic can’t be raised in a non-Catholic household in the Papal States, so the church authorises the police to kidnap Edgardo from his family

Raised personally by Pope Pius IX, Jewish family not allowed to take him back due to Church doctrine, this action destroys the family with grief and despair

This case gets international infamy with the Pope not understanding why everyone’s shiting on him for doing this, including allies

Emperor Napoleon III shifts from opposing Italian unification to supporting it as a direct consequence

Bologna falls the next year, 1859

Kingdom of Italy forms 1861

By 1870 Rome is lost to the Italians and the Papal States are no more

(Edgardo Mortara goes on to become Father Mortara)

The most infamous of these cases was the Finaly affair. Two Jewish children in France, Robert and Gerald Finaly, were placed in a Catholic nursery in 1944 in anticipation of their parents being deported to Auschwitz, where they were both murdered. Their aunt, Marguerite Fischel, survived the war and went to find the boys so she could take them to live with her. However, the nun who had custody of the boys, Antoinette Brun, adamantly refused to give them up, reportedly saying that “The Jews are not grateful”

What followed was a years long custody battle where despite being repeatedly ordered by courts all over Europe to return the boys, Brun took them to many different countries and hid them, with the support and help of other nuns and priests. It was suspected at the time, and later confirmed by documents released in 2020, that Pope Pius XII had supported the effort to keep the boys away from their surviving family and have them be raised Catholic.

Thankfully, after negotiations between a sympathetic cardinal in France and the chief Rabbi of Paris, the boys were finally recovered and reunited with their aunt.

I wish I could say that the phenomenon of the Catholic Church kidnapping children and keeping them away from their families for the purposes of forcefully raising them Catholic is unique to Jews, but it’s not. From the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, the Church ran hundreds of residential schools in the US and Canada where indigenous children were kidnapped from their homes and forced into these cruel and inhumane “schools”. The children were forbidden from speaking their own languages or practicing their own cultures and religions, their hair was cut, and they were subject to emotional, verbal, spiritual, physical, and sexual abuse. Many of the children died due to malnutrition or medical neglect, their bodies buried like dogs beside the schools. The Catholic Church was not the only Church to participate in this, but they’ve been the most reluctant to fully acknowledge and apologize for it. It was only in 2022 that Pope Francis apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church for their part, but some people found the apology inadequate.