i absolutely cannot believe people are trying to start discourse about whether nex benedict was actually nonbinary / whether it was okay for him to describe himself as nonbinary to some people if he didn’t actually identify that way as if he isn’t literally DEAD because he was KILLED. this is a MURDERED CHILD and these monsters are so busy getting mad at the possibility that he might have been a trans boy who described himself as nonbinary to his family because that was easier for them to take that they’re turning a CHILD who was MURDERED into fucking discourse. even when we die at the hands of cis people’s violence, our own community finds a way to make us the villains of the story.

and all of this bullshit on top of the ways that cis people are already trying to say our grief over his death is unjustified. all of this on top of people claiming he wasn’t murdered and speculating on other causes of death (i literally saw someone say he “clearly went home and took the coward’s way out” and i have never been more disgusted) or claiming that he started the fight as if any action on his part could’ve been enough to justify his death. i am haunted by the sound of his father screaming that his child was not filth because that is what people have been saying about this poor kid, that’s how cruelly his memory is being treated, and even the trans community can’t get it’s shit together enough to look past the stupid discourse and see the tragedy in front of us. did you all forget that it was supposed to be up to us to grieve him in the way he deserves when the rest of the world fails to care if people like him live or die? did you all forget that this child was our sibling, the future of our community, a life that we should have had the chance to know and treasure while he was still here but that we now have a responsibility to hold close to our hearts in his absence? nex’s life was precious and it was ended far too soon and if you truly believe that anything is more important than mourning his life and fighting for a world where no more trans people have to meet such an awful fate, you’re a traitor to this community and you do not deserve the place you occupy within it.

i’m so tired. i can’t even imagine how tired his family must be, to see the public treat the child they’re grieving so horribly, to see the world fail their baby again. leave him alone. he was already robbed of peace in life; the least you can do is let him finally have it in death.

Thankfully, the girl who was attacked survived, and is now out of hospital. But how many times will this happen before UK politicians stop shooting their mouths off about 'knowing what a woman is'? Before the UK media stop giving airtime and column inches to TERFs and their allies in the 'legitimate concerns' brigade? Before it's acknowledged that language has consequences?

hey so. i don’t talk about my work as an academic all that much on here but there is something that feels urgent for me to talk about. there was a stabbing of two students and a professor in a gender studies class at a university in my province yesterday, targeting “gender expression and gender identity.” this is my area of study and the province i hope to teach and research it in ( and where I have been doing the work thus far ). these are my colleges and friends of friends. and it just feels really scary. to be trans, to talk and teach about gender, transness, and queernes. critical race studies, indigenous studies, black studies, and mad/disability studies are all in a very similar place - these are my colleges and friends, folks who face reactionary backlash and threats for their counter institutional work.

i feel more so than ever that we are writing and studying and teaching in the face of violent opposition that sees non-normative lives as expendable and reprehensible and the knowledge we produce as, at best, illegitimate and, at worse, something to be eradicated. gender studies has been my safe haven, a space in academia i feel i belong and can prosper. my department has supported my work so thoroughly, has embraced my outlandish trans imaginaries so lovingly, that i forgot what sort of world i’ve been writing against. this is such a violent and heartbreaking reminder.

i hope folks are safe and can access community while they grieve. i hope that canadian gender studies scholars, and counter-institutional scholars from all over the world, are properly supported and protected during this moment. this feels like such a bad omen to me.

in solidarity, danny

I can’t believe #transrights is trending for the ban of someone who violated the TOS multiple times via porn and death threats, and not for the murder of a 16yo nonbinary person. I think one issue here is far severer than the other. Does anyone even care that an 18yo transgirl was stabbed 14 times as a hatecrime recently? Why are actual hate crimes being ignored for a person who quite literally broke the virtual contract she agreed to when she signed up for tumblr? Tumblr has the complete right to terminate her blog.

I'm just so scared. What will you do if Ron DeSantis gets elected president? What will you do if the supreme court goes after sodomy? What will you do if your friend gets shot at a bar? I hate having to think about these things I hate having to make real plans to flee the country if I need to I hate needing to own a gun. It's about killing and dying now it's not about representation or media or language anymore. And I just feel so overwhelmed by it all. I'm so scared.

Another trans man was killed in Puerto Rico. His name is Luis Ángel Díaz Castro and he was killed by his abusive ex-partner who has been arrested- thankfully, his family was supportive of him and he was buried under his proper name.

The first mistake I see people make is assuming there are completely "nonviolent" ways to be transphobic. It seems like some people conceptualize transphobia as being either violent (which is always physical in some way) or nonviolent (which is "simple" emotional, verbal, or psychological abuse)

It seems, also, that people presume that when somebody has "noble" intentions for their transphobia - "I'm trying to save you!" for instance - it is suddenly nonviolent. Consider, though, how a transphobe would "save" a trans person. Would they allow that person to exist unadulterated (including being able to transition), or would they prefer to put them through conversion therapy, or revoke their access to bodily autonomy, or force them to have children, or anything that will prevent them from transition or even identifying as trans or otherwise tying them down with the obligations that prevent transition or identifying as trans?

There is no true "nonviolent" way to be transphobic because being transphobic relies on denying one the ability to autonomy and personhood. Fundamentally, even the transphobes who "want to save us" only do so in their own self-interest to save them from the horror of knowing that more people than they are alive and thriving.

Canada's intelligence agency is warning that extremists could "inspire and encourage" serious violence against the 2SLGBTQI+ community — a threat the Canadian Security Intelligence Service says almost certainly will continue over the coming year. CSIS's comments come as provincial policies on gender-affirming surgeries and pronoun preferences are being hotly debated across the country. "CSIS assesses that the violent threat posed by the anti-gender movement is almost certain to continue over the coming year and that violent actors may be inspired by the University of Waterloo attack to carry out their own extreme violence against the 2SLGBTQI+ community or against other targets they view as representing the gender ideology 'agenda,'" said CSIS spokesperson Eric Balsam in an email to CBC News.

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Tagging @politicsofcanada

warning for extremely transphobic language!

on the surprisingly common idea that terfs/“gender critical” folks support trans men and don’t actually hate us, they just see us as misguided women and something to pity, and still include us in their feminism:

“It takes a complete lack of empathy to say  you’re including trans men in the liberation of “females”, when you call them things like,  “mutilated”, and “disgusting”. “Surgical mutants,” “a young lesbian … with a rancid cavity attached  to a likely twisted and depraved man’s body”. Fuck you. Like…fuck you. […] It becomes very clear that the gender  critical movement holds extreme animosity and disgust for trans men, despite  their claims that they support them for being adult human females.”

— “Gender Critical: Recruitment” by Caelan Conrad

next time someone tries to tell me people don’t demonize and act violently toward trans men and transmascs, i’m just going to make them read this reply i got to a positivity post that was specifically about trans manhood and transmasculinity. this is basically just every negative thing people say no one says about us rolled into one message that’s aimed directly at us.

and as if this isn’t enough on its own, their whole blog is full of this disgusting shit. it seems to be dedicated to it, actually. (fair warning, don’t look at the next two screenshots if you don’t want to see even more genuinely awful transphobia.)

you can say what you want about how they’re probably just a troll or baiting or doing this for attention but the fact remains that, regardless of their true intentions, these are real things that a real person is saying about trans men&mascs, publicly and proudly and to our faces because they want it to do damage.

i’ve dealt with people like this before, on a much closer level. when i was a teenager, i had a grown woman come into my dms just to send me very graphic and detailed instructions on how to kill myself. literally entire paragraphs with all of the steps she wanted me to take. before i blocked her, i told her she was lucky she sent it to me and not someone more vulnerable, because otherwise she might have real blood on her hands. she just sent the whole thing again.

we can argue all day about infantilization versus demonization, erasure versus hypervisibility, what counts as violence, what words we use to talk about our oppression, and so on. but the reality is, whether you believe people want us dead or not, they clearly do, and a lot of them really aren’t making any effort to hide it. at this point, if you can’t see it, it’s because you don’t care about our lives enough to look at the reality that’s right in front of your face.

before you do anything else, block this person. don’t engage with them directly, don’t give them the satisfaction of the attention they might be fishing for, just block them. but don’t forget that they exist either, especially if you’re not a trans man or transmasc yourself. don’t just block them and move on and forget that there are real people out there who will say these things about us, who genuinely enjoy the thought that their actions might have deadly consequences.

because these are the people you empower to come out of hiding and start being blatant about their hatred when you insist that no one wants us dead, when you openly mock us and demonize us and try to cast us out from the community that we were supposed to share. when even our own people decide we’re an acceptable target, these bigots throw a fucking party because you’ve just told them they can get away with murder as long as it’s our blood on their hands. this particular blog was started recently, and i guarantee it’s not a coincidence that they started it in the midst of a rise in online anti-transmasculinity.

it really is telling, how much hate a positivity post has incited. y’all can’t stand when we talk about the bad things that happen to us, but you hate our happiness even more.

A picture of what's been going on at Owasso High School for minority youth, including queer youth like Nex Benedict, is starting to come out.

Kids being called f-- and n----- not bothering to report it because the school does nothing if they do.

hello! I don't follow you but I've seen your post about the fact Tumblr is banning trans women, black people and censoring posts about palestine for no reason float around, I had no idea that was happening, so thanks for pointing that out, but also, do you have more info on that? This might be a huge ask but this is such a strange and sad thing to hear about and I want to know more about it if that's okay.

hi anon! i would like to point out that i'm not one of the marginalized groups being censored by tumblr (as i'm a white, american transmasc) and i recognize that i'm very privileged to not have been censored and have the ability to speak on this, with resources predominantly gathered by trans women and people of color, so in future i would reccomend you ask someone who is a victim of transmisogyny/racism by the tumblr staff. that being said, i'll do my best to educate you and point you in some good directions. if anyone else wants to add anything that i missed to this, or correct any mistake i've made, feel free to do so!

tw for transphobia and screenshots of explicit calls to violence (there will be a clear TW so you know where it is.)

if this gets my account exploded, it’s been real.

the most recent example that made site-wide news was banning the transfemme user predestrogen (also known as rita) who was undergoing transphobic harassment and mass false-reporting for sfw pictures (here's a second tumblr user i found undergoing the same kind of harassment and here's a second account of rita's experience with photomatt from a friend of hers). she reported these threats and false reports, to no avail (as a post here details matt's response to terfism), and got pissed off and made a VERY obviously joking post about the site's ceo mattphoto’s car being exploded with hammers. this was very clearly one of the absurd joke threats tumblr is known for. this resulted in predestrogen getting banned, with matt nearly calling the police on her, and furthermore, followed onto twitter by matt.

here is the tumblr post in question that started everything.

here's one of MANY tweets of matt's to rita, and to do your own research a post i found with multiple more of them.

following users to a platform without them mentioning you? IS REALLY BAD. he deliberately searched for that account and sent multiple replies back to predestrogen. and hey, while we're here, he also..stalked the tags for a little while LMAO and kept replying to random users.

as you can hopefully see, this is very obviously a joke threat. "i hope your car is covered in exploding hammers" is not a credible threat of violence. all of this over..this post.

you don't even need to take my word for it. here is a dropbox folder of screenshots of his that you can personally look through.

please note that this is ONE recent example of a disabled trans woman being banned without violating the tumblr terms of service in the sea of many trans women and people of color who have likewised been banned despite not violating TOS, unlike a few that i can find within about three clicks from my post that went viral. i have reported both of the below replies openly calling for violence against immigrants in the comments of this post already yesterday, and they have not been removed.

tw: explicit calls for violence.

scroll past this section if you do not want to see them.

these are not joke threats. i don't think i need to explain why talking about shooting immigrants is really fucking bad. i’m aware that tumblr has to deal with a large number of reports, but i hope you can recognize the absurdity of exploding hammers being banned and having the threat of a police call and followed on a different platform while actively calling for death to immigrants remaining unchanged at the time of posting this.

tw ends here.

while we're here, have some receipts of matt being not exactly pro-palestine.

to show that this is not a one-time thing, here's him following a zionist on this platform. funnily enough, from math that i could be wrong about..

the right screenshot says transmascpetewentz reblogged with the pro-isreal comment eleven days after its original date, feburary 12th, which means feburary 23rd. which happens to be the same day photomatt followed petewentz. i am not saying matt followed petewentz because of this post, i just noticed a coincidence.

i encourage you to do your own research, ask trans women and people of color on this site, and come to your own conclusions, anon. i hope this could help point you in a helpful direction.

MY THEORY OF TRANSPHOBIC ACTIONS

In light of a conversation with someone I will protect for their privacy, a phrase was spoken to me that stuck around. “It feels like that’s where the acceptance stops.” To paraphrase because the meaning stuck around more than the phrasing. Anyways, it got me thinking. Why are people transphobic? Well while falling asleep I formed three seperate theories which I think make up the majority of actions of transphobia. I’m not talking about misgendering or verbal actions, but physical violence resulting from being trangender.

Trigger warning below for talk of transphobia that may be triggering to some, as well as homophobia and transphobic hate crimes.

ONE

When hatred comes upon the individual for being trangender, and within that, part of the lgbt+ community. There has been a rise of knowledge about transpeople as everyone on tumblr knows, since that is likely how they found out about the concept of being trans. This has led to a rise of right-wing jokes and hatred FOR being transgender, along with comedians mocking transpeople. This point encompasses all the people who think being trans is disgusting, sinful, or makes someone lesser for being it. However this point is split into two sections because there are also people who don’t think transphobic violence is funny while thinking that being trans is too close to being gay. All of this is encompassed here.

It does bring up the question: would transphobic hate be so severe if trans wasn’t included in the lgbt+ acronym?* What is so specific about being trans that gains peoples sneering laughter and hate?

TWO

Where hatred comes upon a transgender individual for being gender nonconforming. This actually ties into the first point a little since gender nonconformity has historically been tied into being gay, or secondly, noticed in more recent years, neurodivergency. Now maybe the transgender individual isn’t gender nonconforming to their chosen gender, but to the eyes of someone who doesn’t know/care/believe in their chosen gender, it still looks like a woman in a suit. Or a man in a dress. Or a woman with short hair and masculine mannerisms and a man who paints his nails and has feminine mannerisms. This almost… *marker* of gender nonconformity is 1) against conservative values and beliefs. Conservatives believe birth sex = gender roles. Women are feminine. Men are masculine. There should never be a cross or you will get a fair amount of disgust for it. 2) tied to being gay which is point one and another thing that goes against (generally) conservative and christian values.

The exception to this is transpeople who a gender nonconforming to their chosen gender. But even then, mannerisms speak MUCH louder than clothes, so I wouldn’t completely count it out here.

THREE

Last but not least, this one came to mind as I thought about the parents or adults around a transgender child. When a child comes out as transgender, suddenly the parent or adult is aware that they don’t have control over the child any longer. That can anger them because parents and adults generally have this image of you in their minds, and expectations to go along with that. The child breaks away from this image in pronouns, appearance, mannerisms and if they want to, the gender role they play in society. The adult is not pleased though so to regain control, they don’t use a child’s chosen pronouns and they don’t allow their child to dress how they please.

Note: I only mention social transition, because I believe that cosmetic (mastectomy) surgeries, going on t or e and more invasive surgeris (on the genetalia) should wait until adulthood for informed consent, like any other surgery. I don’t think caution towards medical transition constitutes to transphobia or a hate crime. But adults should be able to do whatever the fuck they luke too.

My conclusion is that there is an intersection of transphobia and homophobia, as well as a conflict with patriarchal and conservative beliefs that birth sex = presentation. There are likely more causes that haven’t come to mind so far, too.

Anyways feel free to disagree or add in your own thoughts! I’m curious to hear what others think.

*Further note that this is just something I’m thinking about hypothetically. I do not want trans people out of the community. The original inclusion of the T in the acronym was for the intersection of transvestite and transsexual people in the gay communities. I think that stands true today too.

[cw mentions of transphobia + violence]

wrote a poem for tdov 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️

The first incident played out at an apartment complex in Richmond, Indiana, on the afternoon of June 30. Police say that Tommy Wayne Earl, 67, told them he looked out the window of his fourth-floor apartment and spotted Michelle Dionne Peacock, a neighbor he disliked, sitting at a gazebo with another person.

Earl told investigators he’d “had enough” and went out to confront Peacock with a straight razor, allegedly slicing her throat in such a way that she bled out before she could be moved from the scene, according to a detective’s sworn affidavit that was obtained by HuffPost.

In talks with investigators, Earl referred to the victim as “a male acting like a woman,” the affidavit said.

But Peacock was a 59-year-old cisgender woman.

Incidents like this are not new and will only continue to get worse as more and more transphobic bills get passed. Your transphobia hurts everybody. Your transphobia has the potential to kill anybody. And you sick fucks think that violence is acceptable simply because you do not understand how another person chooses to live. Grow the fuck up.