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Attolia broke an amphora once…

#looooove this one #queen’s thief #queens thief spoilers

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tricking myself into doing face practice by making it about the fantasy dykes haunting my brain. had a lot of fun with these designs weeee

#the traitor baru cormorant #i really like these!!!!

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ok tumblr.

settle a disagreement

(if it doesn't even have a name where you live, select the 'no' option please!)

(if YOU have to work but most people in your region don't, select the yes option)

reblog for sample size! THANK YOUUUUUUUU

(i forgot to change the time this runs for NOOOOOOO)

#learning so much about australia today #(we all get labour day as a public holiday but it's only qld and nt that it's at the start of may)

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#palestine

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look at me. listen to me. this is directed at americans for the record. the reason you think North American animals are boring is because you live here. there are so many cool and beautiful animals here. we have beavers. we have wolves. we have moose. we have sea lions. we have armadillos. we have mountain lions. we have alligators. we have foxes. we have bighorn sheep. we have manatees. we have bears. we have ocelots. we have BISON. and that’s not even touching on the birds! or the turtles! or the snakes! we have amazing beautiful and diverse wildlife right here and it deserves to be appreciated and protected

#me in america seeing a squirrel for the first time hehe #also me in reverse when i was hiking with some exchange students and they saw a kangaroo for the first time and got SO excited

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just got to this part of the Queen of attolia… WHAT???!????!! HELLO!?!!?? CAN ANYONE HEAR ME!??!??

#and she was real for that #queen's thief #queens thief spoilers

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This was an interesting read, and I particularly want to highlight this comment by Marta:

I also recently did a set of workshops in DDS about so-called “executive functioning” skills, noting, as you have, that they are really only compulsory for people with less power in a relationship — I’m expected to be on time, but my doctor, for whom I wait sometimes hours in a nightmare of a waiting room, is not. Also, anyone who can hire someone to do their executive functioning for them, or better yet get it done free by a spouse or family member (usually a wife or mother), isn’t required to have these “skills” and can be freed up to go make art or design things in non-linear, iterative ways.

#disability

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An "I'm in Australia, what can I do for Palestine?" masterpost

Petitions:

Petition EN5847 - Provide Consular Support to Palestinian Australian Families (this one closes at 11:59 on the Thursday 15th of February. Please sign before then if you can, and make sure you confirm your email!)

Ask your super fund to divest from companies that support apartheid conditions (Australian Palestinian Action Network)

https://www.aph.gov.au/e-petitions/petition/EN5847

Australia: stop sending arms to Israel (Amnesty International)

Urge Australian Government to Save Local Doctor's Family Trapped in Gaza (petition by family members)

Australia: Reverse decision to suspend UNRWA funding (Amnesty International)

Reinstate UNRWA Funding (Australian Palestinian Action Network)

Grant Palestinians fleeing the conflict in Gaza access to humanitarian support! (Australian Social Workers for Palestine)

Contact your representatives:

Start by finding your MP here

Call or email to ask that Australia push for an immediate ceasefire, provide consular support to family members to leave Gaza, and reinstate UNRWA funding. If that's too much, pick one point to start with! I like to write myself a script before calling, as it removes some of the anxiety. Calling is preferable to emailing, but whatever you have the capacity for is so much better than nothing

Once you've contacted your MP, you can also contact Penny Wong on [phone] or [email protected]

If you can contribute financially:

Donate an eSIM to help Gazans stay connected

Donate to help the most medically vulnerable evacuate Rafah (I completely understand that many people are wary of donating via GoFundMe, but the people involved in this effort do an excellent job at documenting their efforts + keeping records for accountability purposes. Have a look at @raindovemodel @merryfet on instagram for more details

Help El Rahman Inc buy Cairo -> Melbourne tickets for stranded families. They're a Melbourne-based organisation that does amazing work

If you only feel comfortable donating to NGOs, consider the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund, Anera, UNRWA, or the Red Crescent

And, finally:

Come to your local action on Sunday. Even better, bring a friend

If you're a university student, alumni, or prospective student, check whether the institution in question partners with any companies on the BDS list. A disappointingly high number of unis partner with weapons manufacturing companies. If yes, urge them to divest.

Learn the BDS list. Do not purchase anything from companies on the list.

#palestine

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preaching to the choir im sure but it's crazy to me how liberals say that being a revolutionary is doomerism/hopeless. it's communism or extinction and I have the optimism to believe that we can have communism before capitalism destroys the planet on which we live. it's communism or genocide and I have hope that genocide is not a necessary inevitable part of the world. it's communism or borders and I have the optimism to believe that we can have a world without borders. revolutionaries don't just say that hoping for the impossibility of our oppressors taking pity on us and enacting liberation in our behalf, is a fool's endeavour, we also say that we don't need it and oppressed people do have the power to emancipate ourselves and all humanity. I don't think that's hopeless at all, that challenges every doomerist assumption capitalism and liberal ideology is based upon. being a revolutionary means believing in what the powers that be claim is impossible, and having hope that oppression is not an inevitable part of the world. I think claiming that voting for small reforms that only benefit the ruling class and a minority of the oppressed, is the only realistic hope we have, and we can never set our sights higher than that, is an incredibly hopeless and bleak worldview. frankly I'd kms if I were a liberal tbh, I can't imagine being ok living in a world you believe to be so hopeless

#politics

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EDDIE MENTION BY ONE OF THE KATES THIS IS HUGE FOR ANNOYING GAY PEOPLE

#lol #deadloch

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"He took her wine, as carelessly as he had taken her country, and choked on it and died."

#as always. good for her #queen's thief #queens thief spoilers

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I've been rereading "The Queen's Thief" series by Megan Whalen Turner...

I have nothing to say for myself lol

#they <3 #queen's thief #queens thief spoilers

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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.

#feminism

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eSims for Gaza is facing constant eSim shortages.

They get over a thousand requests for connection a day, but their email inbox is regularly sitting at 300-500 eSims. With the bombardment of Rafah and continual internet blackouts, the need for more eSims is particularly urgent.

Even if you have already sent an eSim or donated to an eSim donation drive, there is more you can do. The team is calling for people to campaign in their communities to help spread the word about eSims and encourage donations.

You can help by printing out posters and putting them up in local businesses, on telephone poles and notice boards, or wherever people are likely to see them.

[ID: Poster headed “eSIMs for Gaza” with an illustration of a red poppy, a QR code, and a link to tinyurl.com/gaza-esims; copy reads “Sending eSIMs is an immediate, concrete way to help Gazans on the ground. Scan below to learn how you can get involved.” End ID]

Download color poster (18 x 24")

Download color flyer (8.5 x 11")

Download black and white poster

(For a black and white flyer on A4 / 8.5 x 11" printer paper, just print out the black and white poster: the extra white margin space won't matter.)

Or make your own poster, pamphlet, or protest sign with one of these QR codes:

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polite society is so stressful cause it’s about like. growing apart from your sister and seeing the people you love give up on their dreams. but also what if someone was drugging and testing your sister so they could use her womb to make a clone of themself and they convinced everyone you love that you’re crazy. literally two of the scariest things in the world

#real #polite society

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baru’s worst enemy in the first book is herself

baru’s worst enemy in the second book is lesbian terminator

#the traitor baru cormorant

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#sofia samatar #writing