in the last 24 hours staff has told a trans woman (maia crimew) a rape threat in her inbox doesn’t count as violating TOS, and deleted a trans woman’s completely normal average blog (charlottan) happy fucking pride lmao

Remember when the Biden admin offered tepid sanctions against Individual settlers & IDF units for committing pogroms & war crimes in the illegally Israeli occupied West Bank then walked them all back the moment they received a small amount of pushback from Israel, with the excuse that Israel pinky promised to do reform? Well now Palestinians living in occupied Palestine are being sanctioned by the US for resisting the violence committed by those same IDF units & settlers.

children are starving at the fastest rate that the world has ever known

"Sex" is commonly used to refer to a person's status as a man or woman based on biological factors. Although sex reflects a person's biology, as opposed to gender, which is generally considered to be socially constructed, the biological aspect of the body that determines a person's sex has not been legally or medically resolved. Traditionally, a person's legal sex is established by the sex that the birth attendant places on the birth certificate. Thus, for infants born with unambiguous external genitalia, the external genitalia typically control the sex determination. If the genitalia appear ambiguous, sex is assigned, in part, based on sex-role stereotypes. The presence of an "adequate" penis in an XY infant leads to the label male, while the absence of an "adequate" penis leads to the label female. A genetic (XY) male with an "inadequate" penis (one that physicians believe will be incapable of penetrating a female's vagina when the child reaches adulthood) is "turned into" a female even if it means destroying his reproductive capacity. A genetic (XX) female who may be capable of reproducing, however, is generally assigned the female sex to preserve her reproductive capability, regardless of the appearance of her external genitalia. If her phallus is considered to be too large to meet the guidelines for a typical clitoris, it is surgically reduced, even if it means that her capacity for satisfactory sex may be reduced or destroyed. In other words, men are defined based on their ability to penetrate females, and females are defined based on theis ability to procreate. Sex, therefore, can be viewed as a social construct rather than a biological fact.

— The Road Less Traveled: The Problem with Binary Sex Categories by Julie A Greenberg in Transgender Rights (2006)

interesting to note that 1) the introduction of chromosomal information doesn’t actually provide more “biologically accurate” precision in sex assignment, only a more complex set of administrative and medical instructions on the proceeds of assignment, 2) the only concern in sex assignment is maintaining the distinction that “females make babies” and “males penetrate females to induce pregnancy.”

This is why the idea that “sex is biological” or that we can just drill down to find the sex atom of the human body, be that chromosomes or gametes or whatever else, is premised on the notion that sex assignment is simply a record of a self-evident reality, not the construction of the category of sex as the mythological foundation of cis-heterosexual reproduction

Help challenge the UK ban on puberty blockers

One day before the UK parliament was dissolved on 30 May 2024, the health secretary Victoria Atkins introduced an immediate ban for trans young people using puberty blockers.

Possession of puberty blockers for trans children is now punishable by up to two years in prison in the UK. Puberty blockers for cisgender children remains legal.

The timing of this act was careful and deliberate. As parliament was dissolved the next day, there are now no working MPs in the UK, meaning that citizens have no way to challenge the ban.

The Good Law Project is running a crowdfunder to challenge it in court. They have about £2,000 of £75,000 needed. Please support it if you can, in any way that works for you.

Please sign the petition!!!

kill the rhetoric that americans are so lazy that they won't take farm jobs. americans take labor intensive jobs all the time. the reason no americans will take farm jobs is because agricultural work is exempt from the vast majority of labor laws and labor protections, including the use of child labor. so only immigrants - people who have little to no protection from the law or other options for work - take most of these jobs. we have created a permanent underclass of labor and then say that americans are just lazy for not volunteering to be part of the underclass.

there are actually good discussions to be had about how alienated many americans are from food production (hi hello that's what my only popular post is about), but the real solution to this problem is to protect agricultural workers, citizens or not. ban child labor in its entirety. punish corporations and farm owners that abuse and poison their workers. reform the immigration process so that these people aren't barred from legal protection and recourse.

agricultural workers have been exploited since the dawn of civilization, but the US in specific has been doing this since slavery, and it evolved in the 30s when FDR's labor laws excluded them specifically because most agricultural workers at the time were black. now it's mostly latino immigrants.

food doesn't fucking pick or slaughter itself. but citizens aren't going to take these jobs when the entire industry is rife with abuse - both legal and illegal - and horrific wages and working conditions.

charlotte is one of the most popular and influential bloggers of the last several years on this site. she's been consistently putting out nothing but good vibes, to the extent that i'd credit her with changing the site's culture a bit. part of the broader trend away from constant negativity. there's literally no excuse for deleting her account

Staff have done their best to hide this post, OP's blog has been deleted to hide it. Spread this post as much as you can (ideally through screenshots to avoid it being nuked)

“There's already American contractors here, bidding to rebuild this joint. You're gonna tell me. You know, that's all the defense department is. We're bodyguards for American contractors. [...] The U.N.? They don't... We own the U.N. The U.S government owns the U.N. We foot the bill for the U.N. The U.N. does what we want it to. Except for who? Libya and Cuba. So what. We wanted to go in there in a week, we'd take those over if we wanted to anyways. But we foot the bill for the U.N, they'll vote how we want them to vote. That's just our, that's, that's the U.S puppet. You guys should know that you're, you've been in college, I haven't!”

“Mistake”

Feel like this should be getting some more attention.

"Now, an investigation by the Guardian and the Israeli-based magazines +972 and Local Call can reveal how Israel has run an almost decade-long secret “war” against the court. The country deployed its intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries. ...

It is this spectre of prosecutions in The Hague that one former Israeli intelligence official said had led the “entire military and political establishment” to regard the counteroffensive against the ICC “as a war that had to be waged, and one that Israel needed to be defended against. It was described in military terms.”

That “war” commenced in January 2015, when it was confirmed that Palestine would join the court after it was recognised as a state by the UN general assembly. Its accession was condemned by Israeli officials as a form of “diplomatic terrorism”. ...

On 16 January 2015, within weeks of Palestine joining, Bensouda opened a preliminary examination into what in the legalese of the court was called “the situation in Palestine”. The following month, two men who had managed to obtain the prosecutor’s private address turned up at her home in The Hague. ....

“If Fatou Bensouda spoke to any person in the West Bank or Gaza, then that phone call would enter [intercept] systems,” one source said. Another said there was no hesitation internally over spying on the prosecutor, adding: “With Bensouda, she’s black and African, so who cares?” ....

after the ICC had opened a full investigation into the Palestine case, Gantz designated Al-Haq and five other Palestinian rights groups as “terrorist organisations”, a label that was rejected by multiple European states and later found by the CIA to be unsupported by evidence. The organisations said the designations were a “targeted assault” against those most actively engaging with the ICC. ....

A core ICC principle, known as complementarity, prevents the prosecutor from investigating or trying individuals if they are the subject of credible state-level investigations or criminal proceedings.

Israeli surveillance operatives were asked to find out which specific incidents might form part of a future ICC prosecution, multiple sources said, in order to enable Israeli investigative bodies to “open investigations retroactively” in the same cases.

“If materials were transferred to the ICC, we had to understand exactly what they were, to ensure that the IDF investigated them independently and sufficiently so that they could claim complementarity,” one source explained."

28 May 2024

Happy pride from the Biden Administration

build (the wall) back better