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aronarchy · 1 year

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Let’s not abolish sex work. Let’s abolish all work

By Laurie Penny 26 May 2016

Is sex work “a job like any other”—and is that a good thing? Amnesty International today officially adopted a policy recommending the decriminalisation of sex work around the world as the best way to reduce violence in the industry and safeguard both workers and those who are trafficked into prostitution.

“Sex workers are at heightened risk of a whole host of human rights abuses including rape, violence, extortion and discrimination,” said Tawanda Mutasah, Amnesty International’s senior director for law and policy. “Our policy outlines how governments must do more to protect sex workers from violations and abuse.

“We want laws to be refocused on making sex workers’ lives safer and improving the relationship they have with the police while addressing the very real issue of exploitation,” said Mutasah, emphasising the organisation’s policy that forced labour, child sexual exploitation and human trafficking are human rights abuses which, under international law, must be criminalised in every country. “We want governments to make sure no one is coerced to sell sex, or is unable to leave sex work if they choose to.”

The proposal from the world’s best-known human rights organisation has caused uproar, particularly from some feminist campaigners who believe that decriminalisation will “legitimise” an industry that it is uniquely harmful to women and girls.

As sex workers around the world rally for better working conditions and legal protections, more and more countries are adopting versions of the “Nordic Model”—attempting to crack down on sex work by criminalising the buyers of commercial sex, most of whom are men. Amnesty, along with many sex workers’ rights organisations, claims that that the “Nordic Model” in fact forces the industry underground and does little to protect sex workers from discrimination and abuse.

The battle lines have been drawn, and the “feminist sex wars” of the 1980s are under way again. Gloria Steinem, who opposes Amnesty’s move, is one of many campaigners who believe the very phrase “sex work” is damaging. “‘Sex work’ may have been invented in the US in all goodwill, but it has been a dangerous phrase—even allowing home governments to withhold unemployment and other help from those who refuse it,” Steinem wrote on Facebook in 2015. “Obviously, we are free to call ourselves anything we wish, but in describing others, anything that requires body invasion—whether prostitution, organ transplant, or gestational surrogacy—must not be compelled." She wanted the UN to replace the phrase “sex work” with “prostituted women, children, or people.”

The debate over sex work is the only place where you can find modern liberals seriously discussing whether work itself is an unequivocal social good. The phrase “sex work” is essential precisely because it makes that question visible. Take the open letter recently published by former prostitute “Rae,” now a committed member of the abolitionist camp, in which she concludes: “Having to manifest sexual activity due to desperation is not consent. Utilising a poor woman for intimate gratification—with the sole knowledge that you are only being engaged with because she needs the money—is not a neutral, amoral act.”

I agree with this absolutely. The question of whether a person desperate for cash can meaningfully consent to work is vital. And that’s precisely why the term “sex work” is essential. It makes it clear that the problem is not sex, but work itself, carried out within a culture of patriarchal violence that demeans workers in general and women in particular.

To describe sex work as “a job like any other job” is only a positive reframing if you consider a “job” to be a good thing by definition. In the real world, people do all sorts of horrible things they’d rather not do, out of desperation, for cash and survival. People do things that they find boring, or disgusting, or soul-crushing, because they cannot meaningfully make any other choice. We are encouraged not to think about this too hard, but to accept these conditions as simply “the way of the world.”

The feminist philosopher Kathi Weeks calls this universal depoliticisation of work “the work society”: an ideology under whose its terms it is taken as a given that work of any kind is liberating, healthy and “empowering.” This is why the “work” aspect of “sex work” causes problems for conservatives and radical feminists alike. “Oppression or profession?” is the question posed by a subtitle on Emily Bazelon’s excellent feature on the issue for the New York Times this month. But why can’t selling sex be both?

Liberal feminists have tried to square this circle by insisting that sex work is not “a job like any other,” equating all sold sex, in Steinem’s words, with “commercial rape”—and obscuring any possibility of agitating within the industry for better workers’ rights.

The question of whether sex workers can meaningfully give consent can be asked of any worker in any industry, unless he or she is independently wealthy. The choice between sex work and starvation is not a perfectly free choice—but neither is the choice between street cleaning and starvation, or waitressing and penury. Of course, every worker in this precarious economy is obliged to pretend that they want nothing more than to pick up rubbish or pour lattes for exhausted office workers or whatever it is that pays the bills. It is not enough to show up and do a job: we must perform existential subservience to the work society every day.

In the weary, decades-long “feminist sex wars,” the definitional choice apparently on offer is between a radically conservative vision of commercial sexuality—that any transaction involving sex must be not only immoral and harmful, but uniquely so—and a version of sex work in which we must think of the profession as “empowering” precisely because neoliberal orthodoxy holds that all work is empowering and life-affirming.

That binary often can leave sex workers feeling as if they are unable to complain about their working conditions if they want to argue for more rights. Most sex workers I have known and interviewed, of every class and background, just want to be able to earn a living without being hassled, hurt or bullied by the state. They want the basic protections that other workers enjoy on the job—protection from abuse, from wage theft, from extortion and coercion.

A false binary is often drawn between warring camps of “sex positive” and “sex negative” feminism. Personally, I’m neither sex-positive nor sex-negative: I’m sex-critical and work-negative.

Take Steinem’s concern that if “sex work” becomes the accepted terminology, states might require people to do it in order to access welfare services. Of course, this is a monstrous idea—but it assumes a laid-back attitude to states forcing people to do other work they have not chosen in order to access benefits. When did that become normal? Why is it only horrifying and degrading when the work up for discussion is sexual labour?

I support the abolition of sex work—but only in so far as I support the abolition of work in general, where “work” is understood as “the economic and moral obligation to sell your labour to survive.” I don’t believe that forcing people to spend most of their lives doing work that demeans, sickens and exhausts them for the privilege of having a dry place to sleep and food to lift to their lips is a “morally neutral act.”

As more and more jobs are automated away and still more become underpaid and insecure, the left is rediscovering anti-work politics: a politics that demands not just the right to “better” work, but the right, if conditions allow, to work less. This, too, is a feminist issue.

Understood through the lens of anti-work politics, the legalisation of sex work is about harm reduction within a system that is always already oppressive. It's the beginning, rather than the end, of a conversation about what it is moral to oblige human beings to do with the labour of their bodies and the finite time they have to spend on earth.

Sex work should be legal as part of the process by which we come to understand that the work society itself is harmful. The liberal feminist insistence on the uniquely exploitative character of sex work obscures the exploitative character of all waged and precarious labour—but it doesn’t have to. Perhaps if we start truly listening to sex workers, as Amnesty has done, we can slow down at that painful, problematic place, and speak about exploitation more honestly—not just within the sex industry, but within every industry.

#repost of someone else’s content #article #laurie penny #sex essentialism #sw #feminism #socialism #anti radfem #anti capitalism #anti work

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xxlovelynovaxx · 11 months

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On TME/A, AGAB, intersex people as a token, forcibly sorting intersex people into dyadic-adjacency, and how oppression is defined

(I am addressing all trans people who do this here, regardless of gender. This is not an issue unique to transfems by ANY means and to claim that this is what I am saying to deflect the discomfort you feel upon being made to examine your own transphobia is utterly disingenuous. I also fully expect "coolsville sucks" style cropped screenshots to make it look like I'm saying the opposite of what I am, so I encourage you to read this post if you've come from someone who only showed part of it.)

Y'know, I've seen people SAY "no tma doesn't mean AMAB and tme doesn't mean afab" but like... these same people don't think trans men and trans mascs face a unique kind of discrimination based on their masculinity and instead think they face "only transphobia", and basically don't believe any kind of discrimination against nonbinary people exists whatsoever either, UNLESS the nonbinary people are transfem or AMAB transneutral.

You can see this with "afab privilege" (because ah yes, afab people traditionally have so much societal privilege, especially when read as "really just women but clearly not cis /s).

So what does "tma/tme=/=agab" actually mean, if they don't think any afab people can experience transmisogyny?

It means "we're weaponizing our begrudging acceptance that intersex people (that we deem close enough to dyadic maleness, but we won't say that part out loud) can experience transmisogyny to claim that we're not reducing oppression down to agab, when really we're just saying 'tma means amab+some intersex people" and "tme means afab+some intersex people' and 'the tme intersex people are anyone who wasn't born with male-adjacent features and doesn't even include visibly non-dyadic intersex people who were assigned female bc of a lack of ambiguous genitalia or due to coercive surgery'."

It's all intersexism, all the way down.

So perisex trans folk (and the few intersex people on this bandwagon, you should know better), shut the fuck up about tma/e isn't about agab. Because it's just about agab+. As in agab+ using intersex people to make it seem like it's not neatly divided along agab lines for perisex trans people and even intersex people with features you deen dyadic-adjacent (I've seen you do this, and it's horrifically, disgustingly intersexist to sort us into amab and afab adjacent just like the fucking doctors that mutilate us and force us on meds and destroy our records and violently enforce dyadic conformity).

I also don't wanna hear "it's not about what's in your pants" just because you halfheartedly acknowledge bottom surgery exists. Because we all know that an afab person who is post-op bottom surgery and no-op top surgery with M on his driver's license, who let's say could be mistaken for a trans woman pre-op on hormones, is "tme" to you because they were born with a vagina, and because you've never met other trans people in your life and so foolishly think that transphobes can "always tell" when it comes to afab trans people only.

It doesn't matter if someone is at a point in their transition journey identical to a point someone going the "opposite" way, because what's between their legs and whether it was natal or surgical, to you ontologically determines the oppression they face.

You think only women face misogyny and only trans women face transmisogyny. This is because you define it NOT by materially identical forms of bigotry/discrimination, NOT categorically. But instead as "misogyny/transmisogyny is any oppression a woman/trans woman experiences, regardless of type, and no one who is not a woman can experience this" and then extrapolate this into "so no one who is not a woman can experience identical material discrimination/bigotry under a different name".

This leads to the conclusion that "if someone claims they do that is not a woman they are lying. If there's irrefutable evidence they are telling the truth, since their cuts and bruises and trauma (literal and metaphorical) fall under misogyny and misogyny is only aimed at women and can only therefore hurt women, we're the real victims here."

I know another group of people that believes only women can experience misogyny. R/fs, only they're usually of the "te" variety and not the "ti" variety like you.

Going back to not acknowledging discrimination against nonbinary people, since the usual response I see is to forget amab nonbinary people exist or forcibly label them transfem, sometimes against their will; and to say that afab nonbinary people are as good as cis women:

This is what leads in part to nonbinary people all being sorted into agab groups, and then further labeled as either "transmasc" or "transfem". In this way of thinking, all non-transitioning afab nonbinary people are just women; all transitioning afab nonbinary people are trans"mascs" and therefore spicy trans men; all amab nonbinary people regardless of transition status are transfem. It ignores amab transmasc nonbinary people, amab butch nonbinary people, and afab transfem and femme nonbinary people (who are again considered just women).

So obviously if nonbinary people either face transmisogyny or don't really face transphobia at all, according to this, then trans men and spicy trans men can be sorted into just having male privilege that is obviously always accessible at all times, because every trans man has the option and ability and desire to go completely stealth and hiding your trans identity makes you a privileged coward who hates trans people and benefits from it like a cis man, right?

That's the argument I've heard. This often stems from the idea that T immediately turns you into a hairy muscular tall strong man with no obvious tits or hips or femininely distributed body fat and is basically a miracle poison for turning people into stinky evil men. Not even an exaggeration, that's a word for word conglomeration of the arguments I've heard.

(Nevermind the transmascs and transneutrals transitioning towards androgeny and genderfuckery. Nevermind the no-op and pre-op transmascs with huge tits and hips. Never mind the fat transmascs whose fat curves their bodies in unhideable ways. Never mind those who can't or don't want to take T or for whom T works slowly, which is much more common than you think.)

Where have I heard that? Oh right, the e/i-rf groups. Again.

See, because if nonbinary people faced a unique form of oppression in this argument, it would be more obvious that so do trans men and transmascs. Because, get this, they wouldn't face transmisogyny, y'all are VERY adamant about that, but since afab people are all trans men (plain or spicy) according to you, they wouldn't really face discrimination for being nonbinary. So the type of transphobia they face, you'd have to acknowledge, is unique to trans MEN.

You'd probably still say it's lesser, just transmisogyny with the misogyny chopped off. Or you might go for the "all nonbinary people are either afab OR transfem and therefore afab people all face afab nonbinary type discrimination" and refuse to acknowledge it as unique after all.

The thing is, the rhetoric is twisted in so many circles on purpose. To maintain cognitive dissonance, to refuse to acknowledge a full section of the trans community as oppressed at all, let alone equally. To have someone to punch "up" at when we all know that if you can reach someone to connect your punch, it's not punching up. You just pretend not to hear it connecting.

Here's the thing you all need to get through your stubborn skulls. Bigotry, oppression, discrimination - it's not determined by your identity. It's determined by the bigot's perception of your identity. You know full well that a pre-everything transmasc in the closet faces misogyny*. You know full well that an intersex nonbinary person who has had a tits and full beard since they were 12 can face transmisogyny. You know full well that a butch cis woman beaten for entering a bathroom is not less of a target than a trans woman, at least if you know ANYTHING about queer history and antimasculine violence.

*That doesn't mean, imo, that a pre-everything trans woman in the closet has male privilege, because male privilege is conditional on both others' perception of your identity and your own internal sense of it. Facing transmisogyny, even internalizing it when it's not yet directed at you if you manage to avoid it (which many don't) renders male privilege just as null and void as being perceived as transmasc or even cis gay. Because those make you male "the wrong way" to bigots.

It really all comes down to making up a guy in your head to be mad at. A mythical transmasc that you superimpose on the entire community, that is skinny, perisex, white, abled, neurotypical, christian or atheist, not impoverished, perfectly passing due to the oh-so-massive effects of T even after going through estrogen puberty that even magically can make H cup boobs vanish, who chooses to pretend to be cis and never gets caught.

Why do I list those categories? Because men of color, fat men, intersex men, disabled men, neurodivergent men, jewish and muslim and hindu and other marginalized religions' men, and especially men who are not at least middle class... they don't reap the benefits of male privilege either. Very few men do. Male privilege is as intersectional as any form of oppression - because it is the absence of any of them. Doing manhood "right" is to do it in the colonialist, white supremacist, patriarchal way, and the patriarchy is predicated as much on racism, ableism, heteronormativity, amatonormativity, dyadism, and a dozen other forms of oppression as on sexism and transphobia.

What is my point, at the end of this weirdly mixed formality essay that's written like jorts under a pajama shirt under a business blazer all on top of business formal heels?

That trans people do face unique forms of oppression, each and every one, based on their perceived identity. That anyone can experience transmisogyny, anyone can experience transandrophobia, anyone can experience exorsexism. That so much of anti-transandrophobia discourse is heavily built on tokenizing intersex people to make arguments seem more palatable while being just as violently repressive to us as the rest of the world.

That oppression is defined not by who experiences it, but by who the bigot thinks they are targeting, but that the "real victim" is still the one that gets hit. You aim a gun at Lucy but it hits Jeff instead? Terrible motive, AND still murder.

That you need to examine your own internal biases, deconstruct your own understanding of sexism and its role in upholding the patriarchy, and how it doesn't easily map from cis gender roles to trans people, who according to patriarchy are ALL doing our genders "wrong".

That at the end of the day, listening to and believing other trans people about their own experiences is absolutely necessary, that you don't have to be the more oppressed than other trans people to deserve better than we all get, that stepping on our necks will only cause cis people to cruelly draw their hands back and leave you to die with us in this hole they shoved us in, that trans unity (WITH intersex solidarity) is the only way we all survive.

- your tired neighborhood intersex transneufemmasc

PS if you wanna talk shit screencap and block me. I literally don't care. I'll shut off reblogs at the slightest hint of bullshit or harassment though, whether from t/rfs or shitty transphobic trans people who should know better or from garden-variety intersexists. I'm too busy dealing with my chronic illness bullshit to have any patience for your puerile nonsense.

#transandrophobia #transmisogyny #exorsexism #intersexism #transunity #sexism #misogyny #dyadism #gender essentialism #sex essentialism #patriarchal gender #patriarchy

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tacosransi · 8 months

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oh no it seems i have fallen ON TOP of you with our faces almost awfully close to each other *sexy sax music starts playing*

#my art #digitalart #sxf #spy x family #loid forger #yor forger #yor briar #loidyor #twiyor #twilight kissing your fake wife is actually very essential to your mission #i need to stay sfw on this account so i just used kissing instead of yknow #actually screw it HAVE SEX WOTH YOUR WIIIIIFEEEEEEEEE #GRAAAAHHHHHH

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femmefatalevibe · 9 months

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Femme Fatale Guide: Purse Essentials For Day & Night (or Any Activity In Between)

Daytime Handbag Essentials:

Keys

Wallet/cardholder (ID[s], credit/debit cards, spare cash – enough for an emergency cab/train ticket, a bottle of water, and a cheap snack plus a little extra is my formula)

Phone/phone charger

Airpods/headphones

Mini sunscreen

Hand lotion

Floss picks in a travel floss dispenser

Mini disposable toothbrushes

Breath mints

Portable stain remover wipes

Hand sanitizer

Lip balm/your everyday lip color

Eyeliner

Brow pencil

Power foundation

Contour/blush stick

Oil blotting sheets

Roll-on perfume

Hair ties

Foldable mini hair brush

Feminine hygiene wipes

Panty liners/pads/tampons

Travel case bandaids

Condoms (not in a wallet, please)

A pen or two

Portable sticky notes

Travel pack of tissues

Spare glasses/contacts & contact solution

Sunglasses

OTC pain relief medicine

Water bottle

Non-perishable snacks (I recommend Larabars, Lupini beans/roasted chickpeas/edamame, roasted nuts/trail mix snack packs, Lupii/Raw Rev vegan protein bars, and freeze-dried fruit)

Nighttime Handbag Essentials:

Keys

Wallet/cardholder (ID[s], credit/debit cards, spare cash – enough for an emergency cab/train ticket, a bottle of water, and a cheap snack plus a little extra is my formula)

Phone/portable phone charger

Mini sunscreen

Hand lotion

Floss picks in a travel floss dispenser

Mini disposable toothbrushes

Breath mints

Portable stain remover wipes

Hand sanitizer

Lip balm/your everyday lip color

Eyeliner

Brow pencil

Mini power foundation

Roll-on perfume

Hair ties

Foldable mini hair brush

Feminine hygiene wipes

Panty liner (and maybe a pad/tampon, depending on the time of the month)

Portable makeup remover wipe (or two)

Portable cleansing towelette (or two)

Travel case bandaids

Condoms (at least two – not in a wallet, please)

Disposable foot socks

OTC pain relief medicine

Vitamin B-complex, Vitamin C, and Vitamin D supplement (one of each – for after or the morning after drinking)

Necessary Edit: This list is meant to be a comprehensive guide, designed to be personalized. If you don't think you need some of these items, [pick and choose at your discretion].

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westywallowing · 3 months

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sketches for my fruits basket au while I figure the fuckity out of my tablet pen :)

#miraculous ladybug #miraculous fanart #mlb fanart #mlb #adrien agreste #chat noir #cat noir #mlb chat noir #mlb felix #argos #mlb argos #westy doodles #furuba au #SO what ive decided to go with IS #instead of the animals being from the zodiac like in the show i think its fairly obvious in this au its just the animals of the miraculous #my idea of it is something like a mix between fruits basket curse and miraculous holders #the holder meet the spirits of the animals (the kwamis) and make contracts with them in exchange for power #and one of the downsides is the animal curse essentially #so it does in fact change a lot considering the curse is a CHOICE however i still like the fact that it is indeed a curse #like yeah you get these cool powers but uh you literally can not physically interact with anyone you hold dear that is of the opposite sex:)

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uter-us · 25 days

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this sunday, it was dissapointing to see how easy it was for the boys to run around and get their energy out outside, but for the little toddler girls in impractical frilly puffy dresses and impractical shoes, it's an obstacle for their play.

the girls', clothes are made to be seen in as opposed to being made to be worn, unlike the boys which are still nice for easter but they dont have to trip over the edge of a skirt or dress, or have their shoes fall off or pinch their toes when running, they can move and play freely.

it's a problem too cuz when toddlers don't get that energy out, they get irritable and pitch fits, so then the boys look like easy kids, and the girls difficult. let the girls run around!

female subjugation starts from birth. these girls are praised for being beautiful in their dresses, while also learning they cannot play in them. this correlation will not be lost on them especially as they grow up. "If i want positive attention from the important people in my life (like my congregation), this is what i do." the whole "beauty is pain" narrative, while not incorrect, is often viewed as normal and a justified fact of life, like "beauty IS pain and thats just how it is! oh the things us women go through to look pretty haha!". stop teaching girls that their beauty is WORTH pain, because it's not! they should never sacrifice to look attractive.

if half the congression can dress both formal and practical, so can the other half. don't handcuff little girls to femininity at the cost of their happiness and energy and play.

#I wore a pair of jeans and my little brother's old polo shirt that no longer fits him-- essentially what every #man was wearing. it was nice for Easter and it wasn't uncomfortable and it was practical.#although not the root of my atheism #the subjugation of women in the church does not make me miss christianity. I'm resentful of this institution hurting girls and women #radfem #radical feminist safe #radblr #sex based oppression #not j a reblog tag #male socialization

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faggyangel · 10 months

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thinking about crowley and "my lover's got humor, she's the giggle at a funeral" and "knows everybody's disapproval, i should have worshipped her sooner" and "if the heavens ever did speak then she's the last true mouth piece" and "the only heaven i'll be sent to is when i'm alone with you" and "my lover's the sunlight" and "i was born sick but i love it" and "there is no sweeter innocence then our gentle sin"

#he was born sick #shoveling dirt into my mouth are you kidding #holy fucking shit crowley looking at aziraphale and thinking if the heaven's ever did speak then she's the last true mouth piece #hozier said this song is about “reclaiming your humanity through the act of love” he literally said “it's essentially about sex” and how th #church teaches people to feel shame about sex and love #jesus fucking christ crowley finds absolution through his love and desire for aziraphale not through god or heaven but through this sin #i will not survive i am weak i am mmmmmmm #good omens #aziracrow #inneffable husbands are being inneffable again #crowley tag

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sinn-bee · 4 months

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so I can't stop thinking about your dragon au. How did Liu Qingge and Shen Qingqiu meet? Are they Liushen before they're Bingliushen or just pining messes?

An excuse to talk about Liushen?? Y e s okay so!

The timeline is a little different in this au, meaning that Binghe is going to become a disciple at the sect but not until later (which means he never had to experience SJ), but they meet in the typical Lingxi caves type of situation. Except having a Qi Deviation is Much more dangerous when you are capable of turning into a fuck off sized dragon in a cave system that is not necessarily meant for full size dragons. Lqg treats SY with a lot of caution for a while because he recognizes that this person is (or at least was) SJ!Sqq, but knows that something is very different given that SY!Sqq has different coloration and an entirely different demeanor. He acts on this caution by being around SY a lot to observe him and tries to fight him a few times like he would with SJ but SY always declines.

Eventually they warm up to each other (SY always treated him as SY typically treats Lqg, teasing and whatnot) and as soon as SY realizes Lqg is being more friendly with him he is ecstatic and is even more teasing and friendly and invites Lqg into his hoard and home to hang out and eat together.

Which of course means that SY unknowingly initiates and engages in dragon courting!! And very intimate dragon behaviors that leave Lqg so so confused and scared and happy all at the same time. The little bit of angst in there is that Lqg thinks that this half-baked relationship means nothing to Sqq because of how he doesn’t quite reciprocate things correctly and that he’s just one in Sqq’s long string of lovers and meanwhile SY!Sqq is just like :D wow! How dragons interact with their friends is so interesting (They’re pretty much moved in with each other and almost having gay sex and scent marking each other) (Lqg has given up most of his hoard to Sqq)

So essentially yeah, they’re both happy (one of them reluctantly so) and have their weird not quite a relationship going on for a while and it doesn’t progress past that until plot happens and Binghe returns as an adult to court his Shizun and Sqq is bonked over the head with O h there’s two people trying to date me o.o

I’m a sucker for pining so there’s plenty of it in this au 👍

#what I mean by essentially gay sex is that eventually after one of the many times SY kinda edges Lqg with messing with his horns #or grooming his scales #they do kinda grind on each others slits and SY thinks in a bonding thing because there’s no dicks out so it’s not actually sex??#yeah it’s twisty and goofy and just how I like them #ScumDragonAU #sinn bee art

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ranticore · 23 days

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your harpies give me SUCH unexplainable gender envy

I love their designs! :)

yay thanks, that's fun because king harpies are, kinda by definition, the result of an individual spontaneously changing sex & gender (often by choice!)

(simplified) cuinn/ice storm over kosa before (he was an unwillingly-taken tiercel) and after. 9 months endogenous bird hrt

#ice storm over kosa #he was chosen to be a tiercel because of his unusual colouring but also because his eyesight is dogshit and he could never hunt well #but he hated every second of being a tiercel and essentially spite-willed himself into a sex change so he could fight his king equally #cuinn lost. badly. and was exiled as a result. almost starved to death but then a human found & took him into kosa

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bookinthelibrary · 7 months

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The progressive, rich college having shit accessibility (faulty elevators) is so fucking realistic

#sex education #sex education season 4 #ableism discussion #hell my former college rn only has like 20% of it accessible bc of construction and ableism. they just dont care-#-but i wldnt call them actually progressive.... just kinda surface area bc the president of it essentially started the drag ban here in tn

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nochd · 7 months

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This came across my dash via the #lgbt tag yesterday. I don't want to engage with the OP because that would get me into fights on radfem tumblr and I don't have the energy for that. But the post itself I think is worth answering, just because it's so neatly and exactly wrong.

(Not that my answer is going to spread very far, because I have 37 non-bot followers, of whom I think roughly 35.5 are just here for the nude photos. But anyway.)

Even if I agree just for argument's sake that the existence of intersex people proves that some people can have "nonbinary" sexes, or "third" sexes, and that "sex is a spectrum," how does that have any relevance to people who are not intersex? Like okay, let's "agree" for the moment that intersex people are something other than male or female. How does that make YOU, as a person who is not intersex, something other than male or female? Saying that intersex people's existence somehow makes sex "complicated" for you specifically is like saying that the issue of whether or not you can hear is "complicated" because some other people who are not you suffer from hearing loss or deafness. Like sorry but for 99% of the human population it is not "more complicated" than born with perfectly normal male genitalia = male and born with perfectly normal female genitalia = female, and chances are you fall into that 99%. Sex is not a social construct or a nebulous enigma of a concept. It is not debatable and made up in the manner that gender is. You cannot philosophize about whether there are two sexes any more than you can philosophize about whether humans have two kidneys. Someone having a missing or malformed kidney or accessory kidneys does not change the fact that humans as a species have two kidneys. Humans are gonochoric just like nearly all other animal species on Earth.

Let's start with the arithmetic. If 99% people are of binary sex, that leaves 1% of people who aren't. There are approximately 8 billion humans on Earth. 1% of 8 billion is 80 million -- about sixteen times the population of my entire country. Even just the number of intersex Americans is something like two-thirds the population of my country. This is not a negligible number of people.

There's a deeper error here, one that goes to the root not just of this misunderstanding but of many. Biology is always complicated, at every scale and at every level of explanation. It's messy, it's fuzzy, and it's always bottom-up, never top-down. Everything biological is the way it is because it grew that way. Biology never does the same thing twice.

Why does it seem like it does? Because, of all the ways you can arrange the parts of a living body, only an astonishingly tiny fraction of them actually make a living body. Any genetic mutation that nudges an organism outside of that fraction dies out and doesn't get passed on. Embryonic development is a gruelling tight-rope walk over a vast pit of non-existence.

Now for most of the body's systems, evolution has only had to produce one arrangement that works and survives. There's not an alternative plumbing plan where the oesophagus goes to the lungs and the trachea to the stomach. But for the reproductive system, evolution has to allow for two arrangements that work and survive, and it has to grow them both from the same starter kit.

What it does, therefore, is grow a body plan that works with a continuum of possible arrangements that includes both of those two. Various other points on the continuum may or may not be capable of producing viable gametes, but they're all survivable.

What biology doesn't do -- what biology never ever does -- is run new products on a conveyor belt stamping them into shape with cookie-cutters. The only things made that way are artificial constructs.

#science #biology #sex determination #evolution #embryology #lgbt #intersex #transgender #nonbinary #essentialism #biological essentialism #essentialism is not biological #biology is not friendly to transphobes

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