Tobi Hill-Meyer

Public service announcement: DO NOT attempt to take panoramic photos of your pet. The results are traumatic.

This seems really simple to me. Build a social network that allows sex workers to connect meaningfully with their followers. Allow them to publish the content they want to make.

Build in a way to buy premium content, and suddenly the platform you use for promotion becomes the way you distribute your products.

Wow, 2 days. That’s all it took to get a passionate, enthusiastic and capable group together to start making this happen. I’m so excited. What felt like a silly pipe dream 48 hours ago feels really real all of a sudden.

But we need more. We’re still missing an experienced FRONTEND DEVELOPER and a talented GRAPHIC DESIGNER. Is this you? PLEASE reach out. We need you.

SEX WORKERS - this bits for you. We’re building an entire platform around what works for you, so we need your input. Message me - come join our focus group, so we can get this right for you first time.

I don’t see a lot of post here about this so I’m writing one hastily. Basically a bill called FOSTA just passed in the House today. The bill is supposedly to punish websites that knowingly or unknowingly host content promoting sex trafficking. However they changed the language to allow the federal government to prosecute any website that hosts content promoting prostitution/sex work. 

That means:

*No advertising platforms like Backpage that allowed us to work inside, stay safe, and spend more time with our children *No bad date lists or screening websites like VerifyHim *No peer platforms like Tits and Sass  *No sharing information on how to screen and stay safe. That includes giving referrals. We won’t be able to ask for or give other workers referrals!   *Mainstream platforms like Twitter preemptively banning sex workers

And no, this does not keep trafficking victims safe either. Backpage and other online platforms have been crucial tools in identifying trafficking victims. This bill is to fuck over sex workers and to chill free speech. 

Sex workers and allies, we’re fucked as shit if this bill passes and Trump signs it (he tweeted in support of the bill and so did Ivanka). We MUST stop this bill in the Senate. To do that, we need to call our senators NOW. 

- Get your senators’ numbers here: https://callyourrep.co/ And use this script from Support Ho(s)e:

“Hi, my name is ___and I live in ___(city in district). I’m calling to urge Congressperson ______to vote NO on #FOSTA, House Bill 1865 because it infringes on online free speech and community harm reduction practices.”

- If you’re lazy (like me) you can even text RESIST to 50409 and the RESIST bot will deliver your message to your senators

graphic from National Center for Transgender Equality

See this article from Broadly for more information on FOSTA: https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/7x7m3x/controversial-online-trafficking-bill-will-endanger-sex-workers-advocates-say

One of our baby girls is fat, in the 99th percentile for her age. She is super cute and sweet. Lately, she has been sick with various breathing issues, so she has been reluctant to take her bottles. Normally, she’ll take 4 ounces of formula at lunch and 8 ounces in the afternoon. Today, I was lucky to get to her take 5 all day.

There was a substitute covering a lunch break in my classroom today. We emphasized to her that we need to keep trying to get the baby to drink her bottle until she finished it. She said, “Why are you guys so worried about taking her bottle?”

My coworker replied, “That’s where all her nutrients are. She needs the nutrients and the water.”

To which the substitute replied, “But she’s so fat. She doesn’t need it.”

By starving her. She insisted that her baby was ‘too fat’ and had an aim to remove any and all ‘chubbyness’ so her baby would be thin. She’d already been warned by her doctor about the baby not getting enough food, but insisted she knew best.

After several months of this her baby passed out cold one day and was rushed into hospital where the doctors found her to have severe malnutrition, a low body temperature and low pulse rate. They asked my cousin what she’d been feeding her daughter and she said “one bottle of skimmed milk a day. I don’t want her growing up fat.”

Even after nearly killing her daughter my cousin maintained her view that fat = bad and ended up with all her kids taken from her because she was starving them and neglecting them.

When your fatphobia leads you to starving your own children then you’ve got serious problems.

Is

Real

She backed off saying, ‘Well he looks fine!” – proving once again that weight bias is not truly about health – But I know many other parents who are not as informed as I am about weight science and size diversity would react to this interaction by policing their child’s food intake, if not as an infant, then when he was an older child. This is exactly the type of seemingly-inconsequential interaction that starts the ball rolling on a lifetime of dieting, disordered eating, negative body image, and weight-based abuse for too many fat people.

Years later when he was five, another doctor measured his weight and height and commented that he is off the charts on both, but “at least he is in proportion.” And if he was not “in proportion,” I am sure I would have been advised once again to “watch his weight.” 

I no longer allow healthcare providers to weight my children unless it is absolutely medically necessary. They are unable to control their weight talk, which is a known harm for children.

1. The 4 years old daughter of a friend of mine came to our house to spend the weekend. She gave me a letter from her mom that said that the child was in a glutenfree diet because she was getting ‘awfully fat’ when eating cookies or bread (my celiac ass; who gets dhiarrea and loses a scary amount of weight whenever I eat something with gluten was like ’???’).

You can bet that I went to the supermarket with the kid and told her ‘go & take whatever you feel like eating’ and the poor child came back smiling with her arms full of biscuits and cupcakes.

She didn’t got sick (as a celiac would get) and told me later that she hated the diet her mother made her follow; because her cousins didn’t had to pass through that.

And what’s the scariest thing about this story? Her mother was a NURSE. A fucking nurse who didn’t have a clue of the harm that she was doing to her daughter’s body!

2. My little sister started to feel fatigued and dizzy at 9 years old. She felt nauseated at the sight of food and had abdominal pain that increased with physical activity.

Mom got her to the ER and the doctor dismissed it saying: ‘she’s fat and probably is feeling ill after eating too much burgers, get her to make some exercise and she will be better in no time’.My mom didn’t felt ok with the diagnosis and took my sister with a second doctor who also told her that ‘the child was just fat’.

My sister’s skin was starting to get yellow as the days passed and the abdominal pain was getting awful so my mom (heaven bless her!) got her to the ER for the third time:

SHE HAD STAGE 4 HEPATITIS AND WAS ABOUT TO DIE.

She survived after a long and painful recovery who involved being in bed for a whole year (remember that we’re speaking of a 9 years old child). Luckily they saved her liver and she didn’t went through a transplant… but let this sink:

If it weren’t for my mother, fatphobia would have killed her. Fatphobia kills kids and teenagers, fatphobia kills inocent people everyday. It treats human beings as lesser than others and hurts them in their most vulnerable times.

FUCKING TAKE NOTE OF THIS!

This is Suits Studio, a tailoring company specializing in women’s suits. 

I even got fitted at St Harridan once, but as excited as I was about queer women’s suits, I never really got into the style. The thing about queer women’s suits is, sure they’re cut to fit my body, but why do you have to go to such lengths to hide my breasts and create a super boxy male-bodied look. I’m a butch woman, I want to look masculine - not male. 

That’s when politics were introduced, via Milo Yiannopoulos. He helped further organise what was basically a mob of people who leveled targeted harassment on people who criticised video games in a certain way or who allegedly unfairly benefited from bad journalism in the industry press, and turned them into a mob of people who leveled targeted harassment on targets who share the above people’s ideology and to seek institutional change to strip power and influence from people who hold that ideology. The alt-right.

I mean, it’s okay not to have sex for any reason, because agency is top priority. Like, a white supremacist could vow not to ever have sex with any black people, and they’d be fine in doing so, because despite their views, it’s important that sexual agency takes top priority.

And again, I’d stress that people need to really examine what they mean when they’re talking about genitals, because like, trans women’s genitals tend to be very different (regardless of surgery) than, like, cis men’s. And due to education systems tending to be deeply cissexist, that variance tends to be omitted/ignored/rejected. And as someone who wants trans people to be free of oppression one day, one of my top priorities is getting people to reassess their understandings of bodies, not limited to but including how they fit with sexuality. 

Like, if there’s someone with a penis who expects to penetrate with it during sex, and you don’t want any part of that, and it’s a dealbreaker for you both, then that’s basic incompatibility. That’s obviously not going to work out. 

But, like, just because a person has X genitals doesn’t mean they’ll be interacted with, felt, or seen in any moments of sexual intimacy. There’s a lot of ways for folks to experience sexual intimacy, and provide pleasure to each other, and I think that it’s good to have discussions about that and sexual boundaries instead of just writing people off from the get go based on assumptions about their body that might not hold any truth at all.

Again, unlearning cissexism’s vitally important, and that…and any hypothetical trans people involved in these scenarios, need to be centered in these discussions instead of whether X person is transphobic for not wanting to date people with X genitals. Trans people are a tiny demographic, it’s rare for folks to run into enough where they would have to consider how trans folks fit into their politics of desire. Whereas trans people have to generally learn how to fit cis people into ours, and how to find the safe ones. 

And generally, cis people are not safe for us. it’s why 52%-79% of trans people who date after starting transition have been sexually assaulted/raped by at least one romantic partner, at least once. Cis people are generally terrible at being in relationships with us, and tend to abuse us, usually due to deeply held cissexist views on our bodies, and them harboring secret transphobic stigmas against us. 

So, like, unless you’re asking this question to better unlearn your cissexism, and/or to become a safer current/future friend or partner to trans folks in your life, you’re probably asking the question for the wrong reason. 

Like, a lot of the time, folks ask these questions to basically pressure or guilt trip trans folks into telling them they’re not transphobic and that it’s okay for them to not want us or even consider us, and tbh that’s not very different than someone walking up to me and asking about my genitals. One’s a guilt trip, and the other’s bluntly inappropriate, and both are essentially centering discussion around our genitals and how they might affect people other than us. And that’s just not real polite or much of a meaningful inquiry.

As exhausting as all the blowback I’ve gotten for this (trans women are remarkable able to unify misogynists and radical feminists in their disgust of us), I’ve been really touched by how many people have reached out to say this argument has changed their mind on the subject.

I saw this post recently and it’s powerful. I try not to get involved in debates and discussions about MichFest anymore, since I don’t find them very productive in most cases, but as far as documenting what happened this article goes over some important aspects. And when I saw it talking about a rape that occurred on the land and wondering if there might have been more, I immediately thought of several incidents of sexual assault that I had known about and it seems important to share.

***

When I attended in 2011, I made it a point to talk with many people about the trans exclusion. The topic of sexual assault often came up. Sometimes trans women’s attendance was likened to a “rape” of the festival. Sometimes trans women’s existence was called a “rape” of women’s bodies (a really weird, logic, I know. Apparently trans women ourselves are seen as men, but our bodies are seen as women’s bodies, and so by possessing a woman’s body it is a form of rape).

But sometimes it was not rape as a metaphor, but a fear of actual sexual assault. More than once I was told that someone feared allowing trans women to attend would mean that cis men perpetrators could pretend to be trans women to get on the land and rape the children.

All of this was predicated on the idea that a woman only space is automatically a space free from sexual violence. Four times during my visit, women who had experienced or knew about sexual violence by cis women perpetrators at MichFest would often volunteer that information in these conversations. I’m going to be purposefully direct and minimal in my descriptions.

1- One woman who had attended from a young age told me about being sexually assaulted at the night stage when she was still a minor.

2- Another woman helped organize an annual pudding wrestling and told me about a sexual assault that occurred during a pudding wrestling at a previous year. She was very open about how they responded, changing how the event was held, and emphasized consent at all future events.

3 & 4- Two other women told me about someone they knew who was sexually assaulted, but did not give me any specific details.