The One Thing Thing Funnier Than This Caption Is That The Only Reason They Stopped Doing It Was That

I want you to remember:

The fascists hate you too and they just will pretend otherwise until after they've killed the rest of us, before they turn on you.

“There are so many outrages around the U.S. flights of 238 Venezuelan men to El Salvador’s CECOT maximum security prison that it’s hard to pick which outrage to focus on. That so many of these alleged gang members have no criminal record, and that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, an acronym that’s becoming as notorious as the KGB) seemingly singled out some for their innocuous tattoos, including the emblem of the Real Madrid soccer club? That ICE allegedly tricked its detainees into signing papers that falsely claimed they were going to Venezuela, and is weakly defending itself against the charge that it defied a federal judge’s order to turn the planes around? That Trump himself knows that CECOT is a vile hellhole, and joked about sending Tesla showroom vandals there, even as he claims no memory of signing the order that doomed the Venezuelans?”

—

The frog of democracy is nearly boiled. We can still jump out of the pot

I will never forget and I will never forgive the people who did this to us.

diet culture is so rooted in the idea that our bodies are machines that our minds have to outwit. it pushes for the idea that hunger is something you have to “beat”, that cravings are an annoyance to ignore or outwit, that the way our bodies want to look and want to be is something to fight, that it needs to be helped to do things it was built to do.

here is the liberating truth- your body is so smart and it is trying to help you. it works so hard to keep you alive- sometimes it fails at what it’s trying to do, sometimes it does it in unconvential ways, but it is trying to keep you alive! hunger is our body saying “we need food”- it’s not something to ignore or supress. cravings are our body saying “we need a specific type of food”- they aren’t something to trick or prevent. natural weight and weight distribution are our body saying “this is the shape in which we work best”- they aren’t something to control or reduce. denying this is what hurts us most- even though diet culture tries to tell us that listening to our bodies and treating them with kindness and forgiveness is wrong.

unsung benefit i think a lot of ppl are sleeping on with using the public library is that i think its a great replacement for the dopamine hit some ppl get from online shopping. it kind of fills that niche of reserving something that you then get to anticipate the arrival of and enjoy when it arrives, but without like, the waste and the money.

do people have no shame anymore?

The ADA was passed in 1990 and if it comes to an end now disabled people will have only had civil rights for 35 years

To think, a few years ago we were fighting for the right to work for minimum wage, to get married, to have a savings account, to an inheritance, to own a home or car, etc.

half baked morning rant

I do want to make it clear that the reason I talk about HRT and its biological effects so much is not because HRT or medicalization defines your gender.

Its because, for me personally, the interface of my biology education and my transition was mostly centered around figuring out what sex hormones do. I learned about basic biology principles like DNA organization, gene regulation, cell biology, and physiology in high school and undergrad. Taking that understanding and extending it to the mechanisms that hormones use to change gene regulation, and by extension, the rest of your body broadly, was something I did as my understanding became more complete in later undergrad and grad school. It was the key to me starting my own transition.

Why?

Because it was the first time I realized that the "basic biology" arguments of transphobes were complete and utter bullshit. From that point, it was a cascade. As in, wait, if dynamic changes in gene expression are considered "biological" to them, and I know that isn't true, then why am I believing anything they say about anything else? When they talk about gametes, and try to include infertile cis people in their definitions of biological sex by talking about what gamete you're "intended" to make, what do they even mean? Why does my current gene expression not define that "intent"? And wait, back up, why is the brain suddenly not considered part of our biology? Why are neurological differences suddenly not "biological"? Why can we say someone's thinking patterns aren't "biological"?

Backing up even further, why does any of this matter more than psychological gender, or sociological gender? If the way we navigate society is gendered, that affects a lot of our lives, and we're just throwing that away?

Basically, being educated about how deep the biological changes of HRT really go was the first domino to fall when I worked through my internalized transphobia.

This is one of many reasons why I hate, hate HATE the concession that uninformed allies and even many trans people themselves give: "well NO ONE is saying that you can change your biological sex, sex and gender are completely unrelated, sex is binary and gender isn't!!!!!"

Well. I am saying that you can change your "biological" sex, I am saying that biological sex isn't binary, and I am saying that misunderstanding of those points has set back transgender advocacy. It makes medical decisions surrounding us less informed, it poisons conversations about how we interact with society, and it makes trans people feel like their gender and sex are less "real" than cis people's.

Not to mention the horrific way it discards intersex people from the conversation entirely.

Recently, I've seen this point enter the mainstream a little, by using intersex people and variation of sex in other species as a "counterargument" to "binary biological sex" thinking. It still doesn't sit right with me. One, because it uses intersex people as a prop for trans advocacy while not actually addressing the needs of either group. And two, because it completely disregards that your current biology and physiology is not 100% predestined from birth, and using people who were "born this way" as a prop does absolutely nothing to increase people's acceptance of trans people who change their biology later in life.

Ugh. This got away from me but yeah. That's my sipping coffee ramble for this morning. If anyone wants to add comment or correct me on discourse here, please do. Especially if you're intersex- this is all the observations of a perisex trans woman.

Happy Birthday to my mother Lynne!

At 80, my mom published a murder mystery novel based on her years as a clinical psychologist.: https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Right-Lynne-Bravo-Rosewater/dp/B0D82BXDZR (When a psychologist is killed, her daughter has to figure out which of her former cases led to her murder.)