#anti oppressive practice | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

gingerswagfreckles · 7 months

Text

I think people need to understand that when someone says the situation in Israel/Palestine is complicated they are not necessarily saying that the discussion of who the oppressor vs oppressed is complicated. The Israeli government has been oppressing the Palestinians for a very long time, that is clear, and it is not complicated to understand that at least since the 80s they have had dramatically more financial and military power to keep control of the territory in the way they like.

However, it is reductive and dismissive to insist that there is no complexity in the potential ways to move forward to bring peace to the region. Despite what people on tumblr.edu like to believe, "Israel should never have been created" is not a practical solution to an incredibly heated geopolitical situation in the present day. Israel was created and it does exist. 10 million people live there. 74% of the population is native born and the country has existed for 75 years. Hand waving these fact away with the opinion that "they should move back to where they came from" may make you feel good about being a Radical Leftist, but it does not give anyone a road map for how exactly millions of people without dual citizenship are supposed to just up and evaporate. Nor does it acknowledge the reality that 21% of Israelis are Arabs, the very people you are claiming to want to give the land back to.

Insisting that there's nothing complicated about expecting an entire country's population to willingly dissappear with no consequences is not a productive way to think about this conflict. It ignores the many massive superpowers that have an interest in proping up different states in the region, the power dynamics involved in any land back movements, and the inevitably negative consequences of totally dissolving an established state without a plan. It is also completely and almost comically unrealistic, so much so that it makes it hard to believe that anyone who's opinion starts and ends with this idea really gives a shit about anyone who lives in the area as much as they care about their online leftist clout.

There's nothing complicated in understanding that the Israeli government is and has been maintaining an oppressive apartheid state for decades. It is, however, very complicated to come up with a realistic way to resolve some of the most intricately entangled land disputes on the planet without plunging the region into total chaos. Not everyone has to be deeply educated on every geopolitical situation, but it is very hard to take people seriously when they know nothing about the politics or history of a region and yet insist that there is nothing complicated about it at all.

There's a lot of people on this website who are getting dangerously smug about their own ignorance, and are starting to go down Qanon type anti-intellectual paths in the name of being sufficiently radical. Not knowing the details of a very convoluted land dispute isn't something to brag about online as you call for intentionally reductive solutions. You can support the Palestinian cause and be aware of the oppression they have faced while also holding off on calling people trying to do real analysis and de-escalation work bootlickers. We need to get control of the urge to fit every global issue into a simplistic YA novel narrative structure that appeals to Western revolutionary fantasies.

#gingerswagfreckles #israel #palestine #israel palestine conflict #i/p #i/p conflict

16K notes · View notes

mashpotatoe · 6 months

Text

im a white jew, i was born in israel,

ive lived there all my life and was brought up in an environment that fosters racism driven by nationalism, nationalism driven by racism.

in israel, they teach you jews and muslims (though usually, they just say arabs) have always been enemies, the same way the US deems the entire middle east as a inherent war zone, ridding them of the responsibility for perpetuating war in thst region.

they tell you "were the fair and humane side who strives for peace! its the arabs who never accept the offer!"

i remember the first time i began doubting that sentiment was in fourth grade, when we were having a discussion in class about the character of Saul from the Torah. the teacher was talking about how Saul, the first monarch of the Kingdom of Israel, used to fight the Philistines, and when she added that the Philistines were the natural enemy of the Israelites, she asked the class what group of people is their modern equivalent to which everyone very eagerly replied "Arabs!" and nevermind that there in that same class sat two arab boys, one of whom sat next to me, who i looked at and thought "but he isnt my enemy? hes just a boy in my class."

they teach you to hate arabs. sometimes they say it outright. sometimes they say it more carefully, or make a distinction between good and bad arabs, those who are with us and those who are against us.

in a state based on the idea of (white) jewish supremacy, they teach you jews are naturally superior. they use the conspiratorial narrative of "jews controlling the world" to their favor, giving their own watered down explanation for why antisemitism exists, saying that it must be driven by jealousy.

the zionist movement always used antisemitism to its advantage, either for reinforcing the notion of jewish supremacy or appealing to the real pain and trauma of generations, people who survived the holocaust, connecting them to stolen land where they are "guaranteed" safety ergo granting "justification" for the suffering of others.

its using peoples real pain that makes fear mongering so effective, and when the israeli population grows up being told all of their neighboring countries want to kill them, they quickly get defensive of the "only land where they can feel safe", but the only explanation ever provided for Why these neighboring countries are considered enemies is because theyre arabs.

and when it comes to palestine, it isnt even recognized as a country, nor identity. just a threat. ive talked to many people who are genuinely unaware of the occupation, and they arent willing to believe it either, because the media narrative has successfully shifted the blame on hamas. because "how could it be us? we want peace! its the terrorists who make us look bad! and their children, they grow up to be antisemites*, might as well get rid of them too!" they never stop to think what environment these children must grow up in to develop these "radical" ideas.

* what they mean by antisemite is really just antizionist, but the term anti/zionist isnt practiced in local dialect, being a zionist is treated as a given

any jew who stands against israels oppression is dubbed a self hating jew, but the biggest contributors to antisemitism is the people in charge of an ethnostate, because at any moment they could decide who is not white enough to be jewish, who is too jewish to be white, who stood against the current coalition government and who is an obedient dog.

israelis arent a monolith, but many of them have been won over, convinced its an "us v them" situation, when in reality it could never be the "us" that "loses"

the israeli government was waiting for an event like the massacre on the seventh of october to declare war, to have the so called "right to defend itself", so they could initiate the final steps of an ethnic genocide and displace, if not kill, all remaining palestinians. under the guise of bringing peace.

it isnt too late to call for a permanent ceasefire, to end the occupation.

please contact your representatives, attend protests and rallies if you are able. palestine will be free, and the flowers will rise again.

9K notes · View notes

autolenaphilia · 2 months

Text

The anti-kink moral crusade rests on a lot of transmisogynistic assumptions.

Of course it’s no surprise, since it rests on ideas from the moralizing arguments about bdsm made by radfems in the 70s. The only change is that they are being massively hypocritical and inconsistent about which kinks are bad now, as I pointed out before. Now it’s only certain kinks, like consensual non-consent and fauxcest, that are bad because they “fetishize abuse”, and not bdsm as whole, despite that being inarguably true about bdsm.

And that’s purely to broaden the appeal of such arguments, so that even self-described “leatherfags” can moralize about fauxcest. The morals and principles are frankly just “It’s okay if gay men call their boyfriends “daddy”, because I find that hot, but if a trans lesbian couples pretend to be sisters it’s evil.”

And you can’t really appropriate the radfem arguments about kink without taking their transmisogyny onboard, since they stem from the same transmisogynist bio-determinist root ideology. Janice Raymond in The Transsexual Empire explained trans women through a lens of pathological sadomasochism. Years before Blanchard’s autogynephilia concept, radfems have seen transfemininity and kink as the same thing.

The image of the trans woman painted by radfems then and now, is of privileged males appropriating the pain and suffering of real wombyn, and playacting this suffering for their own perverted sexual amusement. And that is the same image painted of trans women with incest and cnc kinks in modern callout posts. They just remove the explicitly terfy language to make it less obvious. Instead of making a mockery of misogyny in general, we are instead accused of mocking the experiences of the survivors of sexual abuse.

And that boils down to the same thing. Survivors of sexual assault are often as a group assumed to be afab. This ties into a specific transmisogynist discourse. It’s one that argues that afab children are more often sexually assaulted, and that trans women are not targeted by sexual violence pre-transition, and comes to the conclusion that this proves that trans women are male socialized and privileged. This is the fairly nasty transmisogynist undercurrent here.

And it’s proven when in discussions about the transmisogyny of callout culture, a common cliché line in response is that “clearly some people’s worst oppression is being told they are freaks for shipping incest.” This treats transfems as ultra-privileged and transmisogyny as not real at all.

Of course in reality, transfems are disproportionate targets of sexual violence even in childhood and pre-transition. And many survivors of childhood abuse have these problematic abuse-fetishizing kinks, and use it to deal with their trauma, including many of the kinky transfems being called out.

And even if no one involved in the sexual roleplay and fiction being criticized have trauma, the trauma of other non-involved people is not a good argument for its destruction. It’s a reasonable demand to ask for triggering material to be tagged properly so you can avoid it, it’s unreasonable to demand it shouldn’t exist.

Yet transfems are expected to accede to the latter demand. And I think this is because of what May Peterson calls transfeminized debt. It’s how we trans women in feminist circles are expected to be perfect women and perfect feminists to be acknowledged as women at all, instead of as monsters to be destroyed. Of course because nobody is perfect, this leads to every trans woman eventually being thought of as a monster.

We are treated as having to pay off the debt of male socialization/privilege to get basic human rights. And this in practice means conceding every disagreement with TME people, and agreeing to every demand they make of us. Or else we get the hot allostatic load treatment.

And that’s why kinky transfems are expected to fulfil the ridiculous demand from certain puritanical TME people that “I’m not involved in your kink, but I have trauma relating to it, so you can’t do it.” And are treated as evil monsters for not fulfilling it. It’s clearly transfeminized debt and transmisogyny, we are treated as privileged perverted monsters, inherently exempt from sexual violence. And that is used to justify sexual harassment, in the form of callout posts for our sex lives.

#transmisogyny #my writings #callout culture #purity culture

1K notes · View notes

iberiancadre · 3 months

Text

Cannot stand seeing people on my dash celebrating the Pope's statement that "marxists and catholics have the same mission" because those people clearly have no idea about the historical cooption of class politics by the church.

this kind of bullshit goes back to 1891, when Pope Leo XIII published the Rerum Novarum encyclical, addressing the situation of the working class and what the church's stand should be on it. It is, essentially, a socialdemocratic text that defends unionization while denouncing socialists and "capitalism". It still defends private property and the right of capitalists to their profits. This encyclical really made the figure of a worker priest relevant, a low-level priest that's aware of workers' issues and "defends" them. What this figure accomplished was the promotion of class conciliation and therefore a rejection of workers' liberation.

And this is no different. The pope might not outright reject marxism, but in practice, by bringing it down to the level of the catholic church he dilutes marxism into nothing more than "can we pretty please raise the minimum wage according to inflation". The church is, at its core, nothing more than another institution used by capital to appease workers into non-violence and peaceful activism. The very same institution that coexisted with fascism in the 30s and later became a rabid anticommunist tool is now talking about marxists, give me a fucking break.

This is what I'm talking about. How anti-church can you really be if some "good opinions" makes you partial to them. It doesn't matter what the headlines say the pope thinks about trans or gay people if in their actual theology it's just forgiveness for who they think are astray. The church's compassion for any oppressed group does not come from principle, it comes from pity at people who reject the church's teachings. It's no better than the "as long as it's in private" kind of homophobia and transphobia.

#real marxist hours

1K notes · View notes

etz-ashashiyot · 11 days

Text

I know I'm gonna regret posting this, but I just can't not say something: I'm so sick of people who are actively contributing to the ongoing oppression of and violence against Palestinians calling themselves "pro-Palestinian."

In the same way that so many people in the anti-abortion movement are actually pro forced birth rather than pro-child, there are a lot of you who aren't pro-Palestinian, you're just violently antisemitic or in it for yourselves.

If you aren't:

Also angry with the other countries that abuse their Palestinian populations, refuse them citizenship, keep them in displaced person camps under horrific conditions, and/or close their borders entirely to them;

In support of genuine grassroots movements that aim to create some kind of stability, peace, and safety through diplomatic relationships and community building, because that's ""normalization"";

Willing to condemn antisemitism in the diaspora, which helps fuels right-wing rhetoric in Israel;

Willing to shut down lies, propaganda, and disinformation even if it "supports" Palestinians in theory, because lying repeatedly associates the Palestinian movement with lying and makes it harder for survivors to tell their actual stories and be believed outside of the far left movements (and also the truth is bad enough - there's no need to lie);

Willing to focus on practical problem solving over political posturing, especially when it will save Palestinian lives;

Willing to condemn Hamas, which started this most recent disaster, steals aid meant for civilians, uses civilians as human shields, and has been torturing dissenters for years;

Willing to work with Israeli leftists who hate their current government and want peace and full equality for Arab Israelis and their Palestinian neighbors, and also have the best shot at making that change happen; and/or,

Willing to learn about Palestinians as living human beings and value their lives over using them as a political cudgel, whatever that looks like on the ground;

.............then maybe you're more interested in looking radical and jerking off to some fantastical version of The Revolution, and/or hurting Jews than you are in promoting peace, safety, dignity, and self-determination for Palestinians.

Like seriously with "friends" like these, do they even need enemies??

Anyway you should call out the Israeli government for its very real abuses of Palestinians and nothing in this post should be construed otherwise. But if you genuinely care and aren't just in it for internet cool points or leftist cred or feeding your Jew-hate boner or whatever, you gotta prioritize solutions that have a realistic shot at short-term relief and long-term possibility over whatever fits some idealistic goal that will only ever end with more dead Palestinians.

#this post is probably gonna get me drawn and quartered by both ''sides''#but idfc #I'm right #I should've added:#instead of fixating on Jews‚ a tiny minority in the world‚ why don't you focus on Christian 'Zionists' who outnumber us significantly?

692 notes · View notes

premiumessays-blog1 · 2 years

Text

Anti-Oppression Social Work practice

Importance of Anti-Oppression Social Work practice within the context of their “Field Practicum” and the importance of adhering to this type of practice. Students should include (5 Literary, Scholarly Sources) and be sure to give examples of how they will “check their privilege” in their administration of social services.

View On WordPress

#Anti-Oppression Social Work practice

1 note · View note

violetbeauregut · 22 days

Text

In Defense of Feedism

I was absolutely struck when I read @fatliberation‘s beautiful, vulnerable post the other day. They always have brilliant ideas and they show unfailing grace and kindness to everyone, despite a ton of rude, ill-informed backlash (I would 100% recommend following them).

I can’t stop thinking about the reactions to that post and how incredibly strange it is to have to tiptoe around feedism (to use an umbrella term) in a movement that is supposed to be centered around ending the oppression of fat people.

I can understand why fat people who are not feedists would be weary or even repulsed by this kink. From the outside it may seem degrading and manipulative that the language and insults used against fat people are replicated in the bedroom. It is also harmful to be fetishized when you do not want to be fetishized, both in real life and online.

But these are the only points I’ve heard against feedism that I consider to be a legitimate argument in the discourse of fat liberation, as these are the only claims against feedism I’ve come across that are not based in fatphobia. If you are in favor of fat liberation, then you must see fatness as morally neutral. Therefore, the choice to gain weight is not inherently “good” or “bad,” it is instead a matter of autonomy– a right that should be granted to everyone, regardless of size.

The major issue with feedism is the same issue that permeates all kink and, by extension, all sexuality: consent. There are feedists, particularly feeders, who fetishize all fat people, regardless of their wishes; feedists who try to force fat people to participate in kink with or without their knowledge or permission. This is abhorrent behavior; there are no excuses for it. But the problem here is a violation of consent and not the kink itself. The unethical practice of kink does not make the kink unethical. And while feedees are often disregarded in discussions of feedism and fat liberation (which I have already talked about in depth here), there are most assuredly fat feedees, like myself, who are fully consenting to fat fetish play.

While I can only speak for myself, I know that I am not the only person who developed this kink because of weight-related trauma. When you grow up fat, when you are forced to go to Weight Watchers at seven years old, your brain comes to associate fat as taboo and taboo as sexy–but it goes beyond an attraction to something risky or frowned upon.

I live my life as a fat woman; I am fat at the doctor’s office and fat in tiny airplane seats and I am especially fat as a feedee. No matter if I’m engaging with my kink or not, I am fat and I don’t get to stop being fat outside of my bedroom. Out of all of the scenarios where I am existing in my fat body, engaging in kink play is the only one where I am experiencing pleasure because of my body, not despite it. It’s arousing to be praised for the thing that once made you hate yourself. It’s arousing to engage with something you fear or that has harmed you in a safe, controlled context where you have all the power to make it stop.

What anti-feedist fat liberationists need to understand is that feedism is, at its core, a resistance to fatphobia. When you see things that are typically fatphobic in feedist play– terms like “pig,” “cow,” “tubby,” etc. and comments about being “out of shape” or “ruined” by fat– it is not a replication of weight stigma, but a subversion of it. Feedism takes the harmful stereotypes of fatness and robs them of their power by putting them in a new context; a context where fatness is so desirable that feedists want more of it. By using the language and misconceptions of fatness to give and receive pleasure instead of to oppress, feedism not only creates a safe space to heal from fatphobic trauma, but it empowers fatness– it empowers fat people, which is supposed to be the goal of fat liberation.

#fat liberation

791 notes · View notes

thebad---catholic · 2 years

Text

Anti-voting rhetoric will be the death of the left. Literally.

Not a single fucking Republican voted to protect roe. It was fucking overturned in the first place bc trump got three Supreme Court appointments.

Every fucking thing wrong in this country is almost certainly the result of Republicans being in power. In 2020, Texas cut half of the polling places in black neighborhoods, and doubled them in white ones, regardless of population. It was Republicans bitching about mail in voting, and constantly, constantly fearmonger about voter fraud. Literally, their platform is about making civil rights harder to practice.

Would you like to know why? It’s because Republican politicians know better than anyone that higher voter participation means higher republican loss.

But what do I see from the online left, champions of the oppressed?

“Voting doesn’t do anything, the parties are the same, the system is rigged, etc, etc”

Don’t sit here and tell me you give a fuck about marginalized people if you aren’t ready to march your ass to the voting booth and vote out the party actively stripping their rights away.

Protest, donate, community build, unionize, and vote, vote, vote.

By the time direct action is the only option, it will be too fucking late.

#leftist #leftism #politics #voting #democrats #republican #american politics #roe v wade #blm #god you people piss me off

32K notes · View notes

abtrusion · 1 month

Text

Tranny Tango

There's a man on the sidewalk, looking over, then up to see me walking past. He stops in his tracks and stutters back and forth, his read || reaction to me flickering between upstart woman // taller man || hold ground // make space, glitching him in place. When I step off the sidewalk and into the grass, he sheepishly passes me by without a word.

I'm interested in the everyday glitches, the double-takes, the way "everybody is just a little bit disgusted by you," what Susan Stryker calls 'monstrosity' and more than that, the casual experience of being a gaping hole in the gendered world. Stryker attributes this monstrosity to the idea that medical transsexuality, more than any other form of transgenderism, "represents the prospect of destabilizing the foundational presupposition of fixed genders." She takes anti-trans feminists at their word, assuming that their hate stems from some abstract gender trouble that transsexuals pose to female spaces, and her solution is a near-complete identification with that trouble. We can do better. This monstrosity, this glitching, is not just a downstream consequence of spectacular interruptions to some abstract 'fixed genders.' It is certainly not dependent on some unique threat posed by medicalization. It exists through instinctive disgust and constant little glitches in the social infrastructure that is gender, an uneasy response to an uncanny bricolage of the building blocks of gendered life.

Escaping the Cisgender Gaze

The classic trans encounter is to see a visibly transfeminine person out on the street, or as an escort, or in some carefully-curated performance piece, and to realize that gender is a lie. This is part of the utility of transmisogyny, which renders people both constantly accessible and utterly exemplary, and in turn this casts transmisogyny itself as spectacular exclusion instead of a slow social and economic death that sometimes spikes, particularly with multiply marginalized subjects, into horrific violence.

This singularization of transfeminine life and oppression (particularly with trans women of color) through suicide and murder statistics renders both trans life and pain spectacular and implicitly places one as a 'natural' consequence of the other. We need to seriously inspect the many interactions between non-passing transfem people and cis people which do not end with one of them dead. One way to start is Sandra Lee Bartky's understanding of hegemonic femininity as a disciplinary practice.

Femininity as Disciplinary Practice

As the lesbian separatists of the 1970s and 80s intensified the work of rooting out patriarchy from their spaces, they began to discover that nothing was sacred: nearly all everyday social activities were shaped by gender. As Bartky argues, the 'imposition of such discipline on female identity' influences every second of every day:

Iris Young observes that a space seems to surround women in imagination that they are hesitant to move beyond: this manifests itself both in a reluctance to reach, stretch, and extend the body to meet resistances of matter in motion—as in sport or in the performance of physical tasks—and in a typically constricted posture and general style of movement. In an extraordinary series of over two thousand photographs, many candid shots taken in the street, the German photographer Marianne Wex has documented differences in typical masculine and feminine body posture. Women sit waiting for trains with arms close to the body, hands folded together in their laps, toes pointing straight ahead or turned inward, and legs pressed together. The women in these photographs make themselves small and narrow, harmless; they seem tense; they take up little space. Men, on the other hand, expand into the available space; they sit with legs far apart and arms flung out at some distance from the body. Most common in these sitting male figures is what Wex calls the “proffering position”: the men sit with legs thrown wide apart, crotch visible, feet pointing outward, often with an arm and a casually dangling hand resting comfortably on an open, spread thigh. …in a way that normally goes unnoticed, males in couples may literally steer a woman everywhere she goes: down the street, around corners, into elevators, through doorways, into her chair at the dinner table, around the dance floor. The man’s movement “is not necessarily heavy and pushy or physical in an ugly way; it is light and gentle but firm in the way of the most confident equestrians with the best trained horses.”

Bartky concludes that, between behavior and makeup and skin-care, these disciplinary practices "produce a 'practiced and subjected' body, that is, a body on which an inferior status has been inscribed,” and that "the practices that construct this body have an overt aim and character far removed, indeed, radically distinct, from their covert function;" that is, she claims that gender is everywhere, that it is power, and that cisgender women are structurally made unaware of this connection.

What does this mean for transfeminine experience? First, as seen in the sidewalk example we started with (so chosen precisely because of how fucking boring it is), the abstract 'genderfuck' of transfeminine existence congeals into actual examples in the context of gender-as-infrastructure. Gender is a crossing-guard, a gatekeeper, a reviewer -- it performs social functions, all the time, which glitch and shake in our presence. Transmisogyny is not necessarily vitriolic rage at 'boundary-breakers,' it can also just be the passive exclusion of a person whose existence causes a few too many little frictions.

As we've noted, the singularization of transfeminine life makes non-spectacular trans life impossible for cis people to understand, leading to a constant current of disgust/disdain that accompanies their more exciting bouts of transmisogyny. One major inlet to this current is social friction, the way that non-passing transfems are structurally prevented from using social/visual gender infrastructures to do everyday things. The second inlet, which I will discuss in the next section, is the unease provoked by the negotiations transfems take to navigate gendered systems despite this breakage, making small corrections which are ignored, must be ignored, leaving only the horrible lingering fear that they're better at this gender thing than you.

Gender work

Because transfemininity makes no sense from a vulgar gender-power perspective, cis people generally view transfeminine people as either unwitting 'dupes' of gender or as spectacular hyper-aware gender predators, as seen across the HSTS/AGP split, the dead tranny/serial killer media split, the 'scheming eunuch' archetype, and the binarization of transfem identity in queer spaces. But because cis people also generally want to assume that they're talking to someone that isn't an evil serial manipulator, personal interactions encourage and enforce the good tranny archetype, which demands absolute suppression of any sort of informed gender negotiation. This archetype is impossible to fulfill because of the systematic failure of social gender-power infrastructure to account for transfeminine people, which demands some degree of semi-intentional gender work to fill in the gaps.

Fortunately, this work will basically never be understood as such by well-meaning cis people because of transmisogyny, so you don't have to be /super/ subtle about it. Unfortunately, ignoring this transfeminine gender work takes a lot of effort on the part of cis people, particularly if they also have had to perform reparative gender work because of trans-adjacent conditions (divorce, infertility, lesbianism, PCOS). The invisible work cis people must make to keep themselves separate from transfeminine people is then associated with our presence, most clearly articulated in Janice Raymond's lament that transsexual lesbians are feeding "off woman’s true energy source, i.e., her woman-identified self" -- our proximity alone demands intense effort to keep cis gender negotiations distinct from trans ones, growing frustrations that feed the slow current of transmisogyny.

Even if a cis person successfully suppresses their understanding of transfeminine gender work, for folks within queer & women's spaces, this itself leads to a horrible looming anxiety because people in these spaces usually pride themselves on having a full consciousness of gender, and we're a pretty notable exception to that. These anxieties are then channeled into a constant fear of the bad tranny, manifested in the horrible trans woman that your cis queer initiators will tell you to stay far away from. But there is really not much of a difference between the shadowy machinations of the bad tranny and the gender work transfeminine people have to constantly perform to even exist within queer spaces, so transfeminine people are rendered constantly precarious.

What's so deliciously ironic about all this is that this is just a shallow repetition of the cis man // cis woman dyad! Archetypes like 'the poisoner witch' or 'the gossip' or 'the slut' have always been used as a reaction to negotiating power gained via the kitchen, or cloistered social activity, or sex, all routes that men could never understand as a direct consequence of their own gendered power -- so in response to this fear, these roles pilloried exemplary women to structurally terrify the population, but just as importantly to exonerate the rest of the female population, to let men pretend that these weren't tools that everyone was using, to pretend that heterosexual relationships were pure! Just as transfems serve the role of gay best friend^2 in gay mens' films, they serve the role of women^2 in queer spaces, constantly performing gender work which is simultaneously unknowable and terrifying to the cis majority, forcing periodic purges to pick out 'the bad ones' which temporarily exonerate the rest, letting the majority believe that the 'good tranny' actually exists: that mythical trans woman who is not semi-intentionally managing their gender presentation around you, the one you can fuck without worrying if she's just faking it, the one who is good and pure and radical and really, really boring. I have never met a non-passing trans woman like this, but I'm sure plenty of queer people have.

Conclusion

So there are two main forms of everyday experience that express and constitute transmisogyny. The first is the social friction inherent in being freak-gendered in a world that relies on gender to make people move and talk and shit correctly. The second is the friction between the gender awareness demanded of transfeminine people (none) and the practical result of transgendered living in the world. If you want to take some of this back to cis womanhood, I've been trying to reframe the marginalized position of womanhood in terms of articulation work -- that while women have always worked, that work has generally been rendered unreal, always carried out with a dream of not existing, turned into stage-setting for the real boys to grow up and come in and be breadwinners. In this context, our components look like 1) do gender work and 2) don't let it show, and the framing of transfeminine people as socially useless outcasts despite their constitutive role in social life via flexible labor starts to sound a lot like the making of a super-woman, like the mujerísima sometimes invoked in Latin American travesti activism. That sounds just about right. I will become a witch of witches, the lurking terror that eats astrologers, always and ever a little bit too real.

#transmisogyny

488 notes · View notes

intermundia · 10 months

Text

one thing i love about star wars is that the jedi are monks with dangerous psychic space magic, and so they're monks on purpose. they're joyfully and intentionally participating in their institution and finding meaning and happiness in life as monks—anakin is the exception that proves the rule!

it makes me happy to see as many people in the world live like this, and are quite happy with rich, full lives in fellowship with their fellow monks, practicing the tenets of their philosophies, studying the world and themselves, handing down their traditions and wisdom, always helping others; this is such a valid and good way to live, not any kind of oppression.

if anakin had been less selfish, if he had internalized and practiced the jedi philosophy of moderation and compassion, he could have had a rich, happy life (if only he lived in an age without the malice and menace of the sith!) and that's the root of his tragedy that he turned away from those bonds and generous purpose toward his own private pleasure.

it's not easy to practice discipline, but it's so worth it, both for you and everyone whose lives you can touch. it bothers me when i see comments openly and offensively denigrating all organized living; the individualistic amatonormative anti-religion biases of sw fandom are unfortunately on almost continual display. not all religions and religious organizations are abusive and controlling!

i believe from the bottom of my aromantic heart that one don't need romantic love and a nuclear family to be a full human being with a good life. these monks follow their philosophy of moderation and discipline in fellowship with their monastic fellows on purpose and by choice so they can serve the galaxy, and this is such a commendable life full of meaning and love.

the tragedy of their genocide is visible in how that force of generosity and hope for the galaxy was wiped away, for the violent enforcement of a brutal era of exploitation and greed. when luke restores the order and the jedi return, that form of joy in service and endless compassion is returned too. it's a beautiful thing that continually inspires me to live a better and more moderate and generous life.

#being a monk means having your life be part of an institution #and following the tenets of that institution #and that can be a beautiful thing #that many many people do on purpose #sw #jedi order #jedi positivity

3K notes · View notes

jewishvitya · 4 months

Text

Pro-Israel people love both invalidating my Jewishness and giving me death threats by proxy.

And like. Their words aren't a magic spell that's going to erase my ethnicity, heritage, and cultural identity. Anti-zionist Jews have existed for as long as zionism has existed. Even if you disagree, I'm not the first Jew to think that the fight for our safety shouldn't mean an ethnostate, a concept that can only be maintained with violence and oppression towards other ethnic groups in the area.

And I have a lot of feelings about these softer definitions of zionism. Because what does this mean in practice. We've been moving places for thousands of years, immigration is not what I'm objecting to. I love this land, it's the only home I know, and my heart breaks for the destruction we cause here. From burning olive trees to poisoning the soil and the water with our weapons. This is not an expression of our connection to our ancestral homeland. This is violence on both people and land.

But the most jarring element of comments like this, especially now, is that they're treatening me with hatred from Gazans. I'm not scared of them right now. I'm scared and horrified for them.

A Gazan person I know lost contact with his family around a week ago and I've been praying for their safety while knowing that they're traumatized beyond anything I can imagine. And safety isn't even a word I can use for them even if they're alive. They've been homeless for a couple of months now, their house destroyed in the bombing. What safety can they find?

If I was in Gaza right now, I wouldn't be worrying about Palestinians learning I'm queer, I'd be worried about Israeli bombardment, about starvation and dehydration due to the siege, and about the diseases caused by the conditions Israel created there. The hostages that returned spoke about how they were more scared of the Israeli attacks than they could be of their captors.

Even ignoring the "they're not a monolith" and "some of them are queer" and "queerphobic people that hate me don't deserve this either" - how are you threatening me with their supposed queerphobia when the worst danger in Gaza right now is us?

You're not saying this because they want to hurt me. You're saying this because you want them to hurt me. They hardly know I exist. You want me to get hurt to satisfy your hatred of me for being against your movement, and to justify your dehumanization of Palestinians. You want me to be proven wrong for seeing them as people who deserve dignity and freedom and happiness. You're the one wishing violence on me. So don't be shy. Own your death threats instead of projecting them.

#riki babbles

892 notes · View notes

singingcicadas · 5 months

Text

The beginning of the Decepticons according to Megatron:

The beginning of the Decepticons What Actually Happened:

That it could ever be called a revolution of the oppressed is a joke. Megatron's philosophy is purely pugno ergo sum. I fight, therefore I am. His first recruitment speech was a promise for power, made to the most bloodthirsty audience he could dig up from the dregs of society. Those people were there because they thrived off the bloodsport. They wanted audition to join Megatron in the pits. Megatron offered them something even better: turn the entire planet into our gladiatorial arena, and we take.

Ever since the beginning Megatron viewed the Decepticons as nothing but a tool, to be used and thrown away. He wanted them to be as ruthless as possible in order to wipe out all opposition, but once his end goal's achieved, well, there's no place for ruthlessness in a perfect society under his absolute control. Therefore, remodelling and recreating. It doesn't sound like he wants to rule over actual people with individual personalities, he wants a bunch of mindless drones programmed for obeisance and peace and hardcoded to Do What Megatron Says.

Ravage and Tarn. It's interesting how they both use the word "emancipated" when lauding Megatron's accomplishments, when it's clear that Megatron did so for the practical purpose of bulking up his army. He overthrew those in power because he wanted to be the one in power. The only one. The people he "emancipated" were just exchanging one set of shackles for another, as they had no choice other than to join the Decepticon army. Not fighting was not an option. Cowardice was punishable by traitor's wheel. Going neutral was also not an option. Soundwave had specific anti-neutral pogroms for those.

I wonder if they knew what "the Megatron they loved" had in mind for the Decepticons after they won the war. The remodeling and recreating. Or maybe they thought that's just for the lowly genericons. That they would be exempt from such treatment because they were confident of their privileged places at Megatron's side. After all, if you're rooting for someone whose motto is peace through tyranny, you'd do so with the expectation that it's only Other People who are going to get tyrannized.

It's true that he did rise against an oppressive government, despite it being the goal to replace it with himself as the tyrant.

But he also thought the single admirable quality about Zeta was his ruthlessness. As in trying to kill an entire city of his own people to fuel his vamparc ribbon. And he said that in front of Hot Rod, who was forced to bomb his own city to stop Zeta from winning. Even disregarding the twisted values here, this is still fifteen levels up the insensitivity lane. No wonder Hot Rod didn't want to join up.

Torture's for fun and domination. It takes a special kind of sadistic streak. And this is before the war even officially started.

Thundercracker's view on the Decepticon cause, when he defected to save humans from the nuke:

"Everything we have done here" - Just here? He'd either been living under a rock for the entirety of the war or has some serious misunderstandings about what the Decepticon name is.

Or just been willfully blind for four million years and the deaths of a hundred billion lifeforms until the day he decided to grow a conscience. Same with Soundwave.

Tarn's a really good case study because he's the poster boy of Megatron's Decepticon propaganda. Megatron probably spoonfeeds him the stuff by the gigabytes and he regurgitates them with twice the zeal and tenfold the pretentiousness. He's also the embodiment of the vices and tragedy of the Decepticons as a whole, as created by Megatron. A sadistic hypocrite, a glorified thug, a delusional fanatic, a customized tool for use and dispose. Crippled by the blinkering desire to be superior, to be part of a greater cause.

Megatron cares nothing for Tarn, just like how he cares nothing for the Decepticons. During the war they were a means to an end. After Megatron's defection, their "toxic loyalty" became a personal burden, a blemish from his past that he would like to cast aside and move on from but annoyingly refuse to leave him alone.

The road-sweepers and the haulers. The miners. What were they to Megatron during the war? Disposable cannon fodder. A pretty banner to hide behind. For a movement that likes to justify itself as a revolution of the oppressed, the emancipation of the disenfranchised, there's certainly a distinct lack of those classes among the upper Decepticon ranks. Megatron said in his recruitment speech that he wanted strength and power. Then where did that leave the weak and sick, the empties on the streets?

Nowhere but the smelting pool, to be recycled into something useful for the great Decepticon cause. They should be honoured, really.

Freedom fighters? No, freedom won't be missed. Probably has something to do with the remodelling and recreating part.

Starscream's only partially right. It was absolutely Megatron's intent to tap into that well of rage and resentment, and he meant for the riot to happen. Of course it got away from him in the end - that's what happens when you cobble an army out of bloodthirsty power-hungry degenerates, half of which were on board for the violence, half for their own scheming agendas, and the rest stitched together by charisma and fear - but he'd shaped the events enough to come a hairsbreadth away from winning multiple times. People like Shockwave and Scorponok were treacherous, but they weren't the reason that Megatron lost the war.

It was his own blind arrogance that led to his downfall.

No he didn't lose his way. He's exactly where he set himself out to be, from the moment he gave that speech in the arena. Perhaps even earlier, to that gradual slide when killing his opponent in a match no longer felt like a guilty burden but instead brought him the sweet rush of satisfaction. There was no revolution. There was no righteous cause. There was no for the people and never has been, because he did not care about other people. Four million years and countless deaths, and it was only really about one insanely self-centered person and his deluded ambition of peace through tyranny.

Hence his breakdown, because he'd just been hit in the face with the realization that he was Wrong. And has been wrong for the past four million years. He wasted everyone's lives. He wasted his own life, wasted it on anger and destruction and hatred, with nothing but regrets to show for it.

I believe that Megatron believed he's telling the truth here. I believe that he meant every word he said, except for that one "we" on the second last line.

Because that "we" should really be "me".

The Megatron who wrote about pacifist rhetoric, who was compassionate enough to share his fuel with the injured, who cared about others and had genuine friendships, that Megatron died a long time ago in the pits. Ever since then, every murder, every atrocity he'd committed in the name of "the people" was just facist rationalization.

I'm sure that he likes the sound of "emancipation of the people" or "freedom of choice" as a concept. But when it comes down to individual people? With actual, real choices that conflicts with his desire for absolute rule? Nope. He's the only one who should get to make choices. The only one who should have choices. Because he knows best.

Form dictates your function ❌; Megatron dictates your function ✅

Function dictates your fate ❌; Megatron dictates your fate ✅

Great minds must think alike, because Megatron and the Functionalist council in the Functionalist universe did a lot of the same stuff. Massacring the Senate. Recycling people who are deemed useless burdens. Remodelling and recreating. Imperalism and genociding organics. Killing all dissenters. The Functionalists even got pretty close to Megatron's ideal of peace through tyranny with 99% of the planet fitted with brain bombs and kissing the ground at their feet. They even managed to do it while maintaining a habitable planet and full population. And Megatron took one look and was disgusted.

Megatron wasn't a misunderstood revolutionist who had his heart in the right place when he started his war. The Decepticons didn't start out well-meaning and turned bad somewhere along the way. At no point in their movement were they ever true freedom fighters. They were always Facists, through and through. They were worse than the Functionalists they hated and the Senate they overthrew. And it's important to acknowledge this because (other than it's weird to see such an obvious Facist analogy being associated with freedom fighters) otherwise you don't get the whole depth of Megatron's redemption arc, especially in the Functionalist universe.

Like the impact of this scene wouldn't be fully apparant unless you take into account that when Megatron first formed the Decepticons, all he cared about was their fighting strength. He did not care about his troops, he did not care about individual people. He considered himself above everyone and everything. He would have sneered at such a weak, ineffective form of protest. Now he's actually being supportive and seeing people as people, instead of pawns to be used.

Here he's genuinely happy to see the Decepticons, even those in the very bottom of the pecking order, taking enough care to greet them each by name. And also Fulcrum, who he sentenced to death twice.

For once in his life he's actually trying to do the Right Thing instead of focusing on himself, either on his ambitions or his remorse. The people in the Functionalist universe have nothing to do with him, yet he wants to help anyway. And he's finally appreciating the value of self-determination for what it is, instead of trying to twist it to serve his own purposes or turn it into Megatron-determination.

"No one can decide how you live your life except for you." Back before, he was going to remodel his entire army to achieve his peace through tyranny. Autonomy and free will were considered things that won't be missed.

Megatron learned to care about other people! Peace through empathy is such a groundbreaking step for his character because he used to have no empathy! He stayed true to his ideals for eight centuries despite the hardships, despite his personal losses, despite the AVL being driven to near extinction and not knowing if he would ever return to his own universe. During all those years he could have had ten million chances and excuses to break his vow of pacifism or leave on the Last Light, taking the easy way out, and there would have been no one to stop him.

But he didn’t.

#transformers #idw transformers #maccadam #megatron #also he tossed his Decepticons out the back door at first chance in exchange for his freedom and legacy #the trial on Luna 2 #his frowny face when reading the surrender speech wasn’t for letting the Decepticons down it was for his own humiliation

476 notes · View notes