Tumgik
cactusmotif · 15 days
Note
i would actually like to hear more of your thoughts on whipping girl, whenever you feel ready enough to talk about it. i've only ever heard positive recommendations for it. i was thinking of reading it. i've read one or two introductory 101 texts on transmisogyny as well as some medium/substack posts, and always looking to read more as a tme person. ty!
thanks for asking! I'm gonna try to be concise because I'm stuck on my phone for the month, but here are my thoughts on whipping girl:
serano is at her strongest in the book in three areas: manifestations of transmisogyny in media (e.g. how trans caricatures pervade movies), the history of medical institutions developing a pathology of transsexuality (like the diagnostics of blanchard et al. or how trans people seeking healthcare were and continue to be forced into acting out prescribed expressions and manufacturing memories), and the construction of her own transition narrative (telling the reader what it was like for her to grow up desiring femininity in a way that confused her, the experience of crossdressing, the effects of hrt for her)
whenever she's just sticking to this, I think she effectively communicates a lot that the unaware reader could benefit from—even many trans women/transfems/tma people who are otherwise in tune with the history of medicalized transsexualism and our popular depictions could probably benefit from her own personal narrative, by nature of how variegated our experiences can be.
unfortunately I think the book fails at its primary—stated—goal, which is to theorize about transmisogyny. in the big picture this is a bifurcated failure:
on one branch of her argument, she remains committed to there being something biologically essential/innate about gender. this manifests thru multiple claims: that we have "innate inclinations" toward masculinity/femininity and "subconscious sex" rather than what I believe, which is that the latter are constructed categories imposed on different matrices of behaviour/expression/desire in different cultural contexts; that there is "definitely a biological component to gender" (close paraphrase) after a discussion of how she believes E and T tend to affect people (thus equivocating gender with dominant hormones!); that we have such a thing as "physical sex" which is the composition of our culturally decided "sex characteristics" (don't ask me how the dividing line is drawn) even as she says we should stop using "biological sex" as a term; that there is "no harm" in agreeing that "sex" is largely bimodal with some exceptions; that social constructionism is necessarily erasure of transsexual experiences in early childhood... altogether she is unwilling to relinquish arguments about the partial "innateness" of femininity/masculinity and gender. this is at tension with her admission on several occasions that these are neither culturally/geographically nor temporally stable concepts! but that doesn't seem to be a line she can follow thru on.
on another, intertwining branch, she engages in what I think is a deep and widespread mistake in the theorizing of transmisogyny: reducing it (mechanistically) to anti-effeminacy. it is her stated thesis at the start that masculinity is universally preferred to femininity. she doesn't offer a definition of either term until one of the final chapters, where she defines them as the behaviours and expressions associated with a particular gender. but I think this reduction just misunderstands transmisogyny. it is even in tension with an observation she makes early on, that trans women are often punished for their perceived masculinity! but again, this is a thought she seems unable or unwilling to follow thru with.
my problem with the thesis is that masculinity and femininity do not float free of gender—it is not possible to speak of their valuation in the abstract. anyone who grew up as a masculine cis girl and never "grew out" of that "phase" can attest to the violence wrought upon expressions of masculinity from women. and this applies doubly so to the subjects of transmisogyny! not only are we punished for any perceived bleed-through of masculinity from our supposed "underlying male selves", those of us who are willingly masculine and thriving as mascs are punished for our failure to conform to the rules of the normative womanhood that is imposed on us (just as we are punished for any willing femininity as "false" and predatory upon cis womanhood—observe that transmisogyny is reactive degendering in every case!).
on both branches serano makes only perfunctory remarks about the intersections with race, class, and colonialism. "sex" as such was made to only be accessible to the "civilized", most of all the white european! for a racialized person and particularly a Black person navigating gender the waters are just not the same; the signifiers of sex neither available in the same way, nor granted the same medical legitimacy. what is the "physical sex" of someone who is de-sexed altogether? how can gender have a "biologically innate" component when its expressions between the bourgeoisie and the working class are at total odds with one another? this all goes for the masculine/feminine distinctions as well. what sense is there in the claim that we have innately masculine/feminine inclinations when globally (and transmisogyny has been made global!) what is feminine and masculine can be very nearly mirrored? nor is "masculinity is always considered superior to femininity" innocent of obviating race. transmisogynoir adds yet further degendering thru the coercive masculinization of someone as a Black woman—masculinization as punishment, again!
and as a final point, the account fails to be materialist. there is no attempt to place transmisogyny in its role as an instrument of political economy or, as jules gill-peterson might say, as a tool of statecraft. it is just a psychological response to the way the world is, as far as serano has anything to say about it. but how did the world become that way, and why?? serano's solution, the abolition of what she calls gender entitlement, is naive to the fact that gender entitlement is necessary to the maintenance of the capitalist state, which is structured thru patriarchy and built on colonialism. it is not possible to reskin this into something innocuous!
this is why I cannot recommend whipping girl as a work about transmisogyny except at the most shallow level. it could be a helpful critical read, but imo, it is just wrong about transmisogyny.
2K notes · View notes
cactusmotif · 16 days
Text
Tumblr media
Israel has killed more children in Gaza since October than in four years of worldwide conflict
64K notes · View notes
cactusmotif · 22 days
Note
Hi there! 👋 so there's a lot of discourse surrounding the "mature brain" pop science (eg., the brain doesn't "mature" until 25 and therefore we should move the age of consent, bodily autonomy, etc.. to 26). I have found this being peddled by a lot of kids and young adults. Why, in your opinion, are people so quick to self-infantilize (I really don't want to use that word but I couldn't think of anything better) and to take their rights away? Like it's really weird, I would think they'd want more rights, not less.
you could ask the same question about lots of groups: psychiatrically pathologised people advocating for increased medico-legal control over their own lives, for example—but i think it comes down to a few things:
meaningful coalition-building is often hindered by factors like intra-group racism, transphobia, &c ("there should be more control over Those People, but not me, i'm one of the good ones")
discursive constructions that position children's safety/protection and autonomy/rights as mutually exclusive, such that demands for political liberation are interpreted instead as calls for the group in question to be exposed to total social and economic violence ("so you think kids should be left to fend for themselves on the streets?")
the general disenfranchisement and isolation of kids and teens, which also makes coalition-building extremely difficult
the immanently enforced gap between working scientists and the lay public, which allows certain scientific discourses promulgated by public-facing journalists, ted-talkers, &c to maintain political legitimacy regardless of the strength of any empirical evidence for or against them
and relatedly the problem of such discourses having been already formulated by human beings with certain ideological and theoretical commitments and class interests, such that an assertion like "people are basically brain-children who should have my will imposed upon them until the age of 25" gets a lot more legs than "brains probably change throughout a person's entire life and maturity in this sense is largely socially constructed"
379 notes · View notes
cactusmotif · 29 days
Text
i think it's pretty disingenuous to claim that illiteracy is secretly beneficial to the ruling class lmao. lots of assumptions baked in there about the putative value of written information specifically, and about written information as some kind of bastion of truth to power (known voice of the people, the publishing industry). but more to the point it just seems profoundly detached from the extreme hostility that, say, the entire job market systematically exhibits toward illiterate people and even low-literacy people. nothing about our current society is set up to accommodate those who cannot or do not read, like literally this renders people instantly socially marginal and you can see it happening if you've ever seen someone struggling with, say, reading and filling out forms at the doctors office or for a driving test, not to even mention the interpersonal ramifications like the general widespread assumption that reading ability = intelligence = worth. there is no social force or mandate from above demanding illiteracy---quite the opposite in fact
2K notes · View notes
cactusmotif · 1 month
Text
we have to stop letting the usa have such control/influence over international politics
35K notes · View notes
cactusmotif · 1 month
Text
The cops are threatening to arrest my 13 year old transgender child for throwing a cookie. This cannot be real
9K notes · View notes
cactusmotif · 1 month
Text
hey everyone it's been 15 years since twilight. taylor lautner is married to taylor lautner. robert pattinson is a fucking bird. and kristen stewart is doing the dykiest photoshoot imaginable for a rolling stone magazine cover.
31K notes · View notes
cactusmotif · 1 month
Text
we are witnessing the 9/11-ification of october 7th in real time and we cannot let israel and its propaganda use one push back against decades of violence and humiliation as justification for the genocide of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. if your first instinct when talking about what’s happening in gaza is to ask about condemning hamas then you are complicit in it. do not allow them to use it as an excuse.
11K notes · View notes
cactusmotif · 1 month
Text
Fascinated by stories of the - I guess you'd call it the "stolen identity" genre, like, of the Anastasia Romanov variety. But - from both sides.
Your husband has been at war for thirty years. You married when you were teenagers. The man who returns bearing his name looks... plausible, you don't remember his eyes being quite so blue, but it's been thirty years and it's not like you could ever afford to have a portrait painted. He knows your name and the names of your children and your parents, but there are curious gaps in what he remembers. But war does things to the mind. And if he's kinder than you remember? Kind enough that, maybe, you let yourself believe...
No one has ever looked twice at you, since you're just the maid, until the day a revolutionary bomb goes off, blowing a crater in the summer palace. The famously reclusive duchess and the rest of her household lie dead in the rubble. You know that you and she were the same dress size. You know where her jewels are kept. Most importantly, you know the location of the secret tunnel that leads down to the docks, and to a life overseas that would be torturously hard going for a poor maid, especially one suspected as a thief, but a lot more comfortable for a royal in exile...
The old king's most faithful retainer swears this is the heir to the throne, raised in secret and trained to one day step into his father's shoes. As the usurper as dragged off the throne, she screams that the old king's children are all dead, she made sure of it; no one pays her any heed. (Maybe they should have...)
The man in the tavern is buying drinks for the whole bar before he sets sail tomorrow for the far side of the world. He's got it all figured out - a ship of his own, retirement to a tropical paradise when he gets sick of the pirating life. His lip curls as he talks about the stultifying boredom of the aristocratic world he's already left behind. You find out that his parents recently died, and the estate is in the care of his younger sister, who was only six when her brother first left home two decades since. Between the lines, they sound like a good family; they sound like they love him, the way your family never did. Your heart aches. He shows you portraits, letters, before shoving them carelessly back in his coat pocket. They would be so easy to lift...
It's a surprisingly common concept and I just love it. It's The Return of Martin Guerre; it's multiple 90s romcoms; Agatha Christie pulls it half a dozen times. Sooner or later, it crops up in fanfic for just about any fandom with a royal or aristocratic main character.
And I can see why, because there's so much richness to it. From the outside, it can be anything from a horror story to an unlikely love story; from the perspective of the person pulling off the con, a heist movie or a tragedy or a heartwarming tale of found family. And then there are the longer-term implications: What happens if you wear a mask so long that it becomes who you are? What happens if you come to love the "replacement" to the point where you don't want to find out the truth? What is it like to uncover such a deception a century down the line, to find out that your great-grandfather... wasn't?
Just. Identity stories, man. <3
8K notes · View notes
cactusmotif · 1 month
Text
i do think it's silly when people act like the purpose of the UN is to somehow force the USA to do things that the rest of the world wants it to do that it itself doesn't want to do (like ending its blockade of cuba), given that I think we're all pretty aware that there's nothing that can make the US do that other than the barrel of a gun. the UN is still useful as a body coordinating resources on things that have already been established, that's its purpose - making changes to the world is something it should be very obvious that the UN is not and cannot be capable of. diplomacy in general operates only within the bounds of political reality, the thing that changes those bounds is war. there is a difference between recognising the limitations of the UN, and denouncing it for not carrying out the job of a global revolutionary army. a sober and realistic analysis - which is not one-sided - would involve recognition of both positive and negative aspects
956 notes · View notes
cactusmotif · 1 month
Text
Tumblr media
Faye Wei Wei (British, 1994) - Among the Silver-Hoofed Beasts/Strange Noises Made his Flute (2022)
2K notes · View notes
cactusmotif · 1 month
Text
20 February 2024
The United Nations World Food Program has announced a an indefinite “pause” of its activities in north Gaza until conditions are safer for their employees. This is an absolutely catastrophic decision. The WFP’s contributions were already minuscule due to the blockade imposed by the IOF. Now the UN has given up even trying to get food into the north. The United Nations and the criminal governments who run it like a mafia have abandoned 750,000 starving north Gazans to almost certain death, if not by IOF bombs or snipers then by starvation.
The Media Office of the government of Gaza has released a statement in response to the WFP announcement:
🚨 Government Media Office:
We demand the World Food Programme immediately retract its disastrous decision to suspend the delivery of food aid and hold the United Nations and the international community responsible.
We received with shock the decision of the World Food Programme to suspend the delivery of food aid in North Gaza, which amounts to a death sentence for 750,000 people, exacerbating the humanitarian situation doubly. We express our absolute rejection of this decision, which will lead to a global catastrophe.
We demand all United Nations institutions to urgently return to work in the provinces of Gaza and North Gaza without hesitation, instead of shirking and fleeing from their responsibilities and international duties that must be carried out. We hold them fully responsible for the clear shortfall in performing their assigned tasks, as well as for the catastrophic results of the famine deepening in the Gaza Strip.
We call upon Arab and Islamic countries to take a historic, moral, and humanitarian stance in the face of this humanitarian disaster unfolding in the Gaza Strip, especially with the genocide and starvation war. We urge the Arab peoples to take to the streets in protest marches in support of the Gaza Strip, which is undergoing a genocide against civilians, including children and women.
Government Media Office
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
509 notes · View notes
cactusmotif · 1 month
Text
If you're posting about Nex Benedict please acknowledge that they were a Cherokee child killed on their reservation and while I don't know the details, the fact that tribal marshals are not the ones leading the investigation (which is what occurs when perpetrators & victims are both native) leads me to believe their killers were settlers
Nex ᏥᎨᏒ. May the people who hurt you never rest.
Edited to add: it seems Nex may have been Choctaw rather than Cherokee, and that their tribal nationality hasn't been confirmed anywhere just yet. I talked more on my blog about why I stated they were Cherokee originally. I myself am a CN citizen and Choctaw descendent.
Regardless of their origins, they were a part of our community and lived on the Cherokee reservation and went to a public school partially funded by the tribe. Whatever their origins they are my relative as another trans person who deserved to grow up and have a life. And now we all sit and have to hope that the illegitimate settler government of Oklahoma does anything about this awful act.
5K notes · View notes
cactusmotif · 1 month
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
Repost of Instagram post by alessandra_sanguinetti:
“In 2004 I worked as an intern in Newsweek and had to go through the wires coming in from the Middle East.
The Iraq war was raging. Israel was committing its routine violations and killings.
The images were devastating and unequivocally condemning of both the USA and Israel, but I remember the editors would reject all my picks and demand images of burnt cars or vague images of destruction.
So I brought a hard drive and collected everything they didn't publish.
It was my first live glimpse of the lack of ethics or integrity in most US media.
Not the journalists on the ground, but of the senior editors making the calls - in their self important glass cubicles.
And no, to the cynics out there..it's not all too complicated to discuss on social media.
Social media is the only reason we know what's happening in Palestine.
And the only reason mainstream news has to keep up and sprinkle some actual news now and then.
Meanwhile we are seeing much less footage coming out of Gaza - Israel has been killing off all the journalists.
This is terrifying.”
Photo credits: Nasser Ishtayeh, Yossi Alon, Saif Dahlah, Jaafar Ashtiyeh, Musa Al-Shaer, Abed Onar Qusini
38K notes · View notes
cactusmotif · 1 month
Text
Tumblr media
Emilia W. Olsen, “Free Palestine” (2023)
9K notes · View notes
cactusmotif · 1 month
Note
I don't think I have it in me to be an abolitionist because I read that horrible story about the trans teen murdered in South Carolina and my knee jerk reaction is, those people should rot in jail, ideally forever, or worse. No matter how I look at it I can't make myself okay with the idea that you should be allowed to steal someone's life in such a horrible way and then just go back to enjoying your life. Some stuff is just too over the top evil.
You can have whatever emotions you want about that person's murderous actions, but the reality is that the carceral justice system is one of the largest sources of physical, emotional, and sexual torment for transgender people on this planet.
Transgender people are ten times more likely to be assaulted by a fellow inmate and five times more likely to be assaulted by a corrections officer, according to a National Center for Transgender Equality Report.
Within the prison system, transgender people are frequently denied gender-affirming medical care, and housed in populations that do not match their identity, which increases their odds of being beaten and sexually assaulted.
The alternative to being incorrectly housed with the wrong gendered population is that transgender people are also frequently held in solitary confinement instead, often for far longer periods on average than their non-transgender peers, contributing to them experiencing suicide ideation, self harm, acute physiological distress, a shrunk hippocampus, muscculoskeletal pain, chronic condition flare-ups, heart disease, reduced muscle tone, and numerous other proven effects of solitary confinement.
The prison system is also one of the largest sites of completely unmitigated COVID spread, among other illnesses, with over 640,000 cases being directly linked to prison exposure, according to the COVID prison project.
We know that number is rampantly under-estimated because prisoners, especially trans ones, are frequently denied medical care. And even basic, essential physical care. Just last year a 27-year-old Black man named Lason Butler was found dead in his cell, having perished of dehydration. He had been kept in a cell without running water for two weeks, where he rapidly lost 40 pounds before perishing. His body was covered in rat bites.
This kind of treatment is unacceptable for anyone, no matter who they are and what they have done, and I shouldn't have to explicitly connect the dots for you, but I will. One in six transgender people has been to prison, according to Lambda Legal. One in every TWO Black transgender people has been to prison. One in five Black men go to prison in America.
THIS is the fate you are consigning all these people to when you say that prisons must exist because there are really really bad people out in the world. We should all know by not that this is not how the carceral justice system works. Hate crime laws are under-utilized, according to Pro Publica, and result in few convictions. The people who commit transphobic acts of violence tend to be given softer sentences than the prisoners who resemble their victims.
We must always remember that the violent tools of the prison system will be used not against the people that we personally consider to be the most "deserving" of punishment, but rather against whomever the state considers to be its enemy or to be a disposable person.
You are not in control of the prison system and you cannot ensure it will be benevolent. You are not the police, the judge, the jury, or the corrections officers. By and large, the people who are in these roles are racist, transphobic, ableist, and victim-blaming, and they will use the power and violence of the system to terrorize people in poverty, Black people, trans people, "mad" people, intellectually disabled people, women, and everyone else that you might wish to protect from harm with a system of "punishment." Nevermind that incaraceration doesn't prevent future harm anyway.
You can't argue for incarceration as the tool of your revenge fantasies, you have to argue for it as the tool that it actually is. The purpose of a system is what it does. And the prison system's purpose has never been to protect or avenge vulnerable trans people. It has always been to beat them, sexually assault them, forcibly detransition them, render them unemployable, disconnect them from all community, neglect them, and unperson them.
778 notes · View notes
cactusmotif · 1 month
Text
one of rgu's best takes about rape and incest is that rape and incest are not deviant. they are exceedingly normal. they are, in fact, the logical extension of patriarchal romance and the patriarchal family -- the same logic that underpins those structures facilitates abuse, rape, incest, and csa. many people, even those who nominally understand the idea of rape culture, conceive of rape as a deviation from cultural mores, and even more people view incest as an aberration, a twisting of the Family (which is Good) into something unnatural and evil. but rgu correctly identifies that rape and incest are outgrowths of patriarchal society, not alien intrusions upon it. incest is merely a symptom of the problem which is the patriarchal family itself. rape and domestic abuse are merely symptoms of the problem which is patriarchal & heteronormative romance and society itself. rather than rape being deviant, it is resistance to patriarchy which is deviant; rather than incest being abnormal, it is a girl holding out a hand to another girl in pain which is abnormal. because 'abnormal' does not mean 'bad' any more than 'normal' means 'good'. "fall in love normally, get married normally, have a normal family, and have a normal life -- but normal has nothing to do with us!"
3K notes · View notes