Vibe Zone

GO OFF BESTIE

but when you start getting hostile towards efforts to make life better for people who don't pass / don't conform to those standards, like getting pissed off at people who draw art of clocky trans people or want to normalize gender/sex nonconformity, its like. so egocentric right. its giving transmeds complaining about other trans people's decisions or just existence because "it gives me dysphoria!!" or cis women who freak out over people being happy about being infertile or getting top surgery because "well I want to have kids and can't / had breast cancer and its disrespectful to enjoy something that causes me discomfort/distress!!"

ultimately i think everyone needs to be respectful to each other & like, if someone is talking about like, really wishing they could get a surgery, or celebrating having gotten that surgery, you don't need to remind them its okay to not medically transition, time and place etc. and the same goes for pushing ten million passing tips onto people just because they expressed frustration or sadness at their gender being disrespected.

One Nation has won its FIRST ever House of Representatives seat and everyone's acting like they could be the next opposition/government. No they can't. They've yet to go a full calendar year without falling apart internally. Even Pauline Hanson was once kicked out of One Nation. It's that self-destructive of a party.

Also, One Nation doesn't have policies. They just have reactionary bullshit that goes "THINGS SUCK! BOOO! IMMIGRANTS ARE TO BLAME!" that's not a policy. Even if you agree with cutting immigration... then what? What about every other facet of government? What about literally everything else the government needs to do? One Nation doesn't have plans. It just doesn't like Labor. The enemy of your enemy still needs a fucking plan or it's pointless to support them.

The Greens get every policy independently costed. They figure out how much policies cost and how to pay for them. They act as if they could take over the reigns of government tomorrow and put in the work to formulate viable, costed, well balanced and researched policy that listens to experts and tackles real issues. The only party that needs a shadow cabinet is the Opposition, but the Greens create their own equivalent of spokespeople on issues anyway to demonstrate they have the skills and people to formulate complex policy and look after different portfolios. If you want someone competent who has thought out how to form government: the Greens are literally right there.

The Greens are literally the ones with the solution to all the grievances and problems facing One Nation voters but the media either brands Greens as extreme or ignores them. Meanwhile, the media is having a field day blowing air up One Nation's ass because the billionaires who own the media companies don't like Labor and figure they're rich enough to survive whatever fucked up harm One Nation does to the economy if they ever get power.

There's discourse trying to rehabilitate 4chan by claiming it's not really more bigoted than twitter, facebook, or tumblr. This is false. If you've ever considered these takes, please actually go to 4chan (everything's visible with no login) and try spending half an hour there. I used to get porn from /gif/, but I stopped, because seeing 600 slurs every time I visited got tiring. You can't go 5 minutes without seeing KKK-level discourse on Black people, gay people, trans people, Jews, and women. Nazi, incel, and child molester rhetoric is mainstream on 4chan. There's always at least one active thread for non-consensually recorded porn, as well as a trans hate "rope fuel" thread and a natsoc thread. There are bigots on tumblr, but the ones on 4chan are 100x more open and emboldened. I don't trust anyone who tells me they're the same. On tumblr, Black people don't get as many reblogs as white people. Some of you scroll on by, or leave ignorant comments like "I've never heard of that kind of racism. It doesn't sound real." When a Black person posts on 4chan, they get told, "don't post [slur]s here. There's already a thread for [slur]s, so post it in that thread and quit shitting up this one." I'm paraphrasing - the people on 4chan are substantially less civil. I understand "channer" is often used against transfems on tumblr, trading on the stereotype that trans women come from 4chan. The answer is to deconstruct the stereotype - most trans women did not come from 4chan. If you did come from 4chan, the answer is "I've left it behind and deconstructed the attitudes I learned there," NOT "It's no worse than other websites!"

i think "man" and "woman" are also gender umbrella terms tbh. i think there are issues with "nonbinary" or "genderqueer" being a descriptor for both third-gender people and people whose gender identity lies outside binary exclusive male/female norms, which is why i have started trying to use nb/gq/gnc more on a political level. but at the same time i perpetually have to see people talking about "women" and "men" in ways that are textbook exorsexist and assume that no one can be both, and that happens in progressive spaces nearly as much as more centrist/conservative spaces, even if its (normally) less openly hostile. but no one cares because its politically expedient to pretend that there is a true unifying nature of "manhood" and "womanhood" that goes beyond everyone agreeing to use the same word.

anyways. my point being even as someone who personally identifies more as an androgyne than an enban, on a social level i can get behind "enban" as a collective term for people who feel their gender is primarily defined more by being outside binary norms of gender identity. and like. we SHOULD be including third gender people anyways, and no one is. there ARE no widely used terms for gender-neutral or third-gender people. its not their/our fault that people see gender neutrality as the extent of nonbinarity.

I've been out as trans and nonbinary for well over a decade now. I've been out since thw time when almost all nonbinary people were fighting very hard for our nonbinary genders to be considered as real, valid, and distinct from cis genders as any binary trans person's gender, and it was considered transmedicalist and exorsexist to suggest that nonbinary people were less trans.

And something I remember from that period was the use of the term enby.

Enby was a term that some people chose to use because it was cutesy and they liked that about it. I remember some transfem nonbinary people who said they liked it because they never got to be cutesy or girly as children, so it was a way to reclaim that as adults. It wasn't all bad.

The problem was that most of the time, that wasn't how it was used. It was used to infantilize nonbinary people, as a pejorative, and in particular, it was used to infantilize transmasc nonbinary people by implying that all of us were pink-haired, pastel-wearing, ukulele-playing, cutesy, girly cis girls who liked pretending to be boys.

Now, there were nonbinary people, some of them transmascs, who fit a lot of those stereotypes, including some who proudly called themselves enbies, and they weren't the problem. They didn't do anything wrong by dressing that way or calling themselves that. The problem was that other people, usually transmedicalists, used that stereotype as a means of denying the diversity of nonbinary genders and experiences, denying the existence of transfem and amab nonbinary people, denying the masculinity of transmasc nonbinary people (especially those who preferred to present more traditionally masculine and wanted to medically transition), and infantilizing all nonbinary people while treating us as teenagers and preteens who wanted to be part of a childish trend at the expense of real transsexuals.

It's not a coincidence that the time when I suddenly started encountering a lot of newly out teenagers who insisted that I was the real bigot for telling them what I believed to be progressive, that their genders were as real and distinct as any other trans person's and that they were trans whether they felt they had experienced enough discrimination to "qualify" or not, kids who parroted back all the things the transmedicalists had been saying for years but "progressive," who treated nonbinary and gnc as the same thing and didn't understand when I explained that one can be an afab nonbinary woman and still be trans but that it was different from being a gnc cis woman, was exactly the same time I encountered a flood of those same people calling the entire community enbies and viciously attacking anyone who didn't want to be called that, or even people who did but who argued that it should be a choice.

i think "man" and "woman" are also gender umbrella terms tbh. i think there are issues with "nonbinary" or "genderqueer" being a descriptor for both third-gender people and people whose gender identity lies outside binary exclusive male/female norms, which is why i have started trying to use nb/gq/gnc more on a political level. but at the same time i perpetually have to see people talking about "women" and "men" in ways that are textbook exorsexist and assume that no one can be both, and that happens in progressive spaces nearly as much as more centrist/conservative spaces, even if its (normally) less openly hostile. but no one cares because its politically expedient to pretend that there is a true unifying nature of "manhood" and "womanhood" that goes beyond everyone agreeing to use the same word.

anyways. my point being even as someone who personally identifies more as an androgyne than an enban, on a social level i can get behind "enban" as a collective term for people who feel their gender is primarily defined more by being outside binary norms of gender identity. and like. we SHOULD be including third gender people anyways, and no one is. there ARE no widely used terms for gender-neutral or third-gender people. its not their/our fault that people see gender neutrality as the extent of nonbinarity.

My gut reaction to this was "I wouldn't, fuck him", but then I realised that I do actually have thoughts about this.

Open with a white-text-on-black-screen intro that explains that dialogue in this film has been taken wherever possible from historic recordings. Where it couldn't be, it has been constructed from records of the relevant parliament/private discussions that are on record, even if not word for word. Add that all events depicted are real. And, to reinforce this, a huge load-bearing pillar of the marketing for the film would emphasise that this is extremely limited in artistic interpretation, it's all things the man actually said and did. This, the marketing would stress, is the REAL Churchill, in all his complexity. This is the nuanced and complex and very human guy we don't see in the history books, strengths and flaws and all of it.

The first... half, maybe even two thirds of the film would be pre-WW2. A full account of all his actions in power, painting the picture of the man he was. His belligerence disguised as wit, sending in the army against striking Welsh miners, his initial admiration for fascism and eugenics, all of it. All reproduced from things he actually said and did.

Then, the realisation that Hitler included Britain in his fascist plans. The U-turn into hating the guy, all while believing in the same underlying points.

Then, most of the WW2 section would be in montage form. And at this point, the audience sees why he was actually fairly well suited to the task of opposing Hitler, because all those flaws meant he was ego-driven to resist the Nazis or die trying, and that was what was needed at the time. We've set up that ego, that belligerence, that eloquence. Here it is, in context, actually being useful.

But, this would be juxtaposed with all the things we're carefully not told, that are nonetheless historic record. The starving of India to get food to Britain. The lack of bomb shelters in London, and then claiming credit for sending people into the Underground when they thought to do it. The use and abuse of non-British Commonwealth troops in roles kept from the white soldiers. All of that goes in.

And then, once the war was done, the fallout. The rest of the film would cover his fall from power, first of all - the fuck up at the Potsdam Conference, then his continued use of lurid and hyperbolic war rhetoric in the general election campaign that basically made Clement Atlee and let Labour win.

Labour's creation of the NHS, and national parks, and other such things. Churchill's opposition. The fallout to places like India, the Suez, etc.

And then his return for a final term as Prime Minister in which he was unpopular, unsuccessful, and also very unwell; he was 77 and had multiple strokes, which were hidden from the public. He was against the dissolution of the empire, but Labour had already pulled the trigger on it, so his final years were basically a lot of war crimes and whining as countries declared independence; which won't be a surprise to the audience, because we've literally heard his views on eugenics and imperialism already. Of course those didn't go away with WW2. All that congealed ego and imperialist drive, so useful against Hitler while keeping the worst costs away from the UK, made him a fossil unsuited to the role of peacetime leadership in a post-war recovering nation beginning to decolonise.

And finish on how, at the end, he supported the UK's application to join the EEC - the precursor to the EU.

The whole thing would make the Churchill cultists so fucking angry. They'd 100% claim liberal bias and piss themselves. But that's why you'd have to go so hard on stressing in the marketing that all of it is true; he literally said this. He literally did this. It's all real. Even the EU bit. Yeah, you voted against Churchill.

from the second video:

But building on that essay [first video], and what we’ve discussed today as a prime example of a narrative born from the “homophobes are secretly just gay” trope, I want to examine why it’s so resistant to correction, and why people that are otherwise usually media literate and concerned with truth over comforting myths might grab onto this with both hands and refuse to let go. And I'm including myself in this. The first time I heard the Grindr crash thing, I laughed. I'm not coming to you from moral superiority. I'm coming from a position of "I also fell for this and then felt annoyed about it and made it everyone else's problem in the form of a video essay because I think the truth is actually a more effective political weapon than a lie." So why does this work? I think there are four main reasons, ranging from "understandable" to "I'm not sure that's healthy babe." The first reason: yo, it feels good. Queer people are constantly on the receiving end… Of right-wing politics in a material, tangible way. These aren't abstract disagreements. These are people who've campaigned on the premise that your love is invalid, your identity is a disorder, your existence is a threat to children. And when the power imbalance is that stark, there is something extremeeeelllly satisfying about the idea that the oppressor who thinks they are so much better than you is nothing but a fraud. They can’t even meet their own bar for “deserves rights.” It's the political equivalent of "the bully has a crush on you." We're told that story from childhood. So when someone offers an adult, political version, "they're homophobic because they're secretly homosexual", we’re already primed and lubed, and it slides right in to how we understand the world. And suddenly, the power dynamic feels more manageable, they’re just pathetic self-hating gays, I’m not scared of that. It feels good, and it feels true. And that’s the exact kind of story that goes viral, regardless of whether it’s based on evidence.

The "Republicans crash Grindr when they gather" claim has every quality of what misinformation researchers call “sticky”, as in, it’s sticky. It’s sticks to your brain. And it does so, even after you learn the truth. Researchers call this The Continued Influence Effect (CIE). It’s a cognitive phenomenon where misinformation continues to influence a person's reasoning and beliefs even after it has been clearly and credibly retracted. The paper posits that people continue to use misinformation because, on some level, they still feel it is relevant or useful, even if they know it's false. This paper frames this not just as a problem of forgetting the correction or new information, but as a problem where the feeling of familiarity and narrative coherence from the original misinformation overrides the factual knowledge of its retraction. We believe, because it feels true.

Super disappointing to finally see artwork accurately representing my body and realize it’s being reposted on subreddits like “awful taste but great execution” and “diwhy” :( Like this is so cool

I know this screenshot is from a post from a couple of months ago but I want to put it in its own post because it’s so demonstrative of the kind of backwards reasoning these people use when it comes to trans issues.

When I say that both transmasculinity itself and transmasculine oppression are epistemologically neutered, this is exactly what I mean. Inequivocable proof of transmascs being unambiguously targeted for their transmasculinity (in this case, trans men of color being essentially tortured in ICE camps) is still inadmissible, because all this news proves is that a transfeminine person would have it worse. There is a rhetorical sleight of hand at play that substitutes the real, named transmascs in the story - specific and individual human people who relayed their own experiences in details firsthand - with entirely hypothetical transfeminine people not in the story at all. The transfem that the tagger imagined in their head for the sole purpose of dismissing anti-transmasculine violence becomes the real person, while the real and named transmascs melt into a mist and become purely hypothetical.

The nature of inhabiting transmasculinity in a world of history-long transmasculine epistemicide is that you are never taken as yourself, in your full living human body, with its discrete characteristics (whatever they may be), its history, its traumas, its unique positionality: you are never read as yourself because your ‘self’ is inherently illegible. Instead you’re like a text in an unknown language that others try to interpret comparing you to know quantities (even aberrant ones) and always finding you lacking in some way - less beautiful, less strong, less virtuous, less meaningful, less interesting, less valuable - because you are being graded on a system that is not just built without you, but rather built around your absence.

To make an example: Often I speak of the ways that growing up as a member of the female social sexgender class has shaped me in the person I am, and specifically the behaviors I have been trained and coerced into in order to escape additional punitive violence (on top of the regular violence being seen as a girl/woman gets you just to keep you subdued into the underclass). I have been taught to walk a certain way, stand and sit a certain way, to make way for people that register as men, to shrink myself around them, to fawn, to smile, to modulate my voice to sound submissive and placating, to defer to them, to apologize for speaking in the first place, to wrap my speech in conditionals and justifications, to make a show of doubting myself even when I’m sure of what I’m saying. This behavior is impossible to completely unlearn while living in a body perceived by others as female, because every step out of line is answered by a retaliation equal in proportion. You people would know about this if any of you listened to cis women. transitioning does not remove this behavior, certainly not instantaneously, and on top of that, having this heavily feminine-coded behavior and speech patterns while appearing even ‘imperfectly’ or ‘somewhat’ male is also grounds for punishment, more or less severe. You would think the people who talk all day of transmisogyny would be able to see this.

Now if I speak of this, I sometimes receive this response: but what about when you pass? When you look and sound and move exactly as a normative cis man does, won’t you have the space and opportunity to unlearn this behavior completely? will you still be claiming that your upbringing has shaped you so, ‘clinging’ to your AGAB? And that certainly sounds like a good argument, if you don’t notice the sleight of hand. If you ignore the fact that it is being told to me, a specific individual trans man with a specific history and body. I am 30 years old. I have been medically transitioning from a while. I do not look like a cis man or a cis woman or a transfeminine person - I look transmasculine. As of now, this much-discussed ‘male passing privilege’ has not reached me even remotely.

Now, because there is no cultural notion of what transmasculinity is or looks like, I am usually read as a medically aberrant and gender non conforming cis woman. At times I’m also read as a gender non conforming, queer, very young cis man, while some other times I’m read as transfeminine. In a few extreme cases where I do my best to ‘girlmode’ out of necessity I can even read as a quasi-normative cis woman, albeit an extremely quirky one. But I am never, ever read as a normative cis man. That has genuinely never happened to me. It is very possible that, due to a mix of my individual medical circumstances, my desires for my own body, and my sexuality and aesthetics, I may never happen. I may never move through the world as a normative (and straight) cis man on a regular basis. I cannot know that for sure because I have a hopefully long life ahead of me, but I certainly wouldn’t discount it as a possibility.

And still, to the person posing the argument of “what about when you pass”, my lived reality for my entire 30 years of life, which will continue to be my lived reality for the short and medium term future, is superseded by the specter of the entirely hypothetical, very possibly forever-inexistent, normative cis-passing straight-passing stealth masculine man they have summoned in their own mind to dismiss the real, present, firsthand testimony of my own lived experience. Their ‘headcanon’ of what I could one day turn into becomes more real than the living, breathing person I am.