The thing about transphobia is it's 90% simple misogyny: trans women get treated like uppity women who need to be put in our place and trans men get treated as "damaged women" who need to be "protected" from their own choices.
Trans women are degendered or misgendered the same way Black women often are, too, mocking our appearance and describing us as "men" in a derogatory manner, an insult transphobes know only works on us because we are women.
The anti-trans backlash is part of a wider sexist, misogynistic backlash in our culture, and one reason the fascist movement has poured so much scorn on trans women specifically is because we're still widely regarded as an acceptable target of bigotry, women who don't even have patriarchy's meager, condescending protection inasmuch as we're seen as worthless.
Don't forget that the patriarchy has always been a violent, warlike system. The role of young men is to fight as soldiers for the old patriarchs, who are the ones that survived the war. The role of women is to bear as many children as possible, to produce the young men that are the cannon fodder for the wars and the young women who produce the next generation after that. Patriarchal masculinity has to be dominant, brutal, and violent, because men need to be warriors, living weapons for the old patriarchs at the top of the hierarchy, while femininity has to be submissive, gentle, and obedient, to keep the whole system running without falling apart. Transgender people are of no use to the breeding programme and disrupt the entire ideology of "natural" gender roles,, that's why they're a threat.
Very well said. Observing from my non-trans perspective, seems to me that trans women are simultaneously treated as "uppity" women, just as you say, *and* as "not real women" *and* as "effeminate" men, with the emphasis shifting according to the transphobe's purpose in that moment. Which adds massive gaslighting to all the other elements of targeting and bigotry.
@MelissaBenyon And I would say that mirrors many of the ways that cis women, particularly lesbians, butches, and women who can't or choose not to have children, are also treated by this society. Trans women are even subject to "corrective rape," not with the goal of forcing a pregnancy, obviously, but to try and intimidate us back into the closet or what have you.
@MelissaBenyon That. Rape as punitive works two ways: one, sex under toxic masculinity is a dominance performance, but two, *everything women do* under patriarchy is sexualized, and thus all their transgressions are sexualized, and so thus are their punishments. The frequency with which men unthinkingly suggest bad men should be beaten and bad women should be raped is *high* - and when questioned about the discrepancy tend not to have an explanation, it soaked in with the culture.
Literally NONE of the men in my life who have suddenly glommed onto the "protect women's sports! protect women's spaces!" angle EVER gave a damn about women in sports, women's spaces, or women's safety, until that became a popular stalking horse for transphobia and transmisogyny.
(It's like how "Think of the children!" only ever means "We want to ban LGBTQ+ books" and not "free school lunches" or "gun control to end school shootings".)
New British House of Lords appointments announced. UK politics is just a contest to see who can run the most transparently nihilistic grift and still get cushy life tenure in Westminster.
There needs to be a way to restrict the number of political peers who can sit in the Lords at a time. Either they can elect some number of their own body similar to the hereditary peers or have a first-come-first-served each day to allow them in.
The subject matter experts are useful, they help beat legislation into some sort of usable shape. That's the Lords serving a useful function.
Those who monitor such things and report in Other Places, are saying that for the last couple of days there have been no transphobic articles in the usual suspect UK papers.
The guns have fallen silent.
Some are speculating this is mere preparation for a renewed assault. Others wonder if they've found out the result of the FWS court case early - and are either overloading on triumphalism or desperately trying to figure out how to spin the loss.
Whatever the cause, watch your backs peeps and have your support networks ready just in case.
it would be very unusual if anyone knew the result already after only a couple of weeks - typically there's a three or four month delay between hearings and the judgement. Presumably for a significant fraction of that not even the judges know the outcome yet.
One begins to fully appreciate why "May you live in interesting times" is a curse. I think the hope this time is that things will crash and burn so badly in the next couple of years that the whole thing is definitively resolved. Or that all the campaign promises are kept and we really do get lower egg prices.
Useful questions that in-universe characters could ask:
What kills the people sent out to clean?
Why, despite us clearly having been down here a very long time, does it seem that everyone sent out to clean dies after about the same amount of time? Why is the threat not diminishing over time?
Why were these very well stocked silos ready and waiting and apparently very well matched to the threat outside? (In the books, Lukas does ask this question and gets an answer, and the answer is correct but incomplete).
This is not mentioned in the books, but I’m assuming the secret library of the before times that IT has does not mention climate change. The vault library probably does, but if IT knew about climate change, they could learn something interesting by monitoring external CO2 levels.
It’s quite astonishing to watch the Bluesky people keep digging that hole.
Now apparently they auto remove any post that has the house number and street of Jesse Singal in. As a result, literally everyone on the site now knows what they are, thanks to the Streisand Effect.
@A Spectre, Haunting @Kincaid @kianryan ☑️🐙🏳️🌈 I'm really wondering how they're going to handle the backstory parts of Shift though. The whole, "WHY were umpty-billion people murdered?" thing is kinda important to the storyline.
I'm confused as to why the wound on her arm is getting worse.
Atlanta was nuked, some of the surrounding area was nuked. The rest of it is all fiction.
There's no evidence at all in the books that the W.O.O.L. conspiracy succeeded in nuking the earth and cleansing everything. The only are the nanobots are active is in the area around the silos, because they're being replenished by the cleanings.
Thurman wanted all knowledge of nanotech erased and the entire conspiracy was to do a Bene Gesserit for 500 years to raise a society that would never again create the tech. Thurman saw it as an existential threat to humanity.
He specifically makes sure that Donald is at the convention because everyone else is going to die.
It's never mentioned in the books, but I strongly got the impression that the Atlanta incident was a FAE. They look like nukes (see Beirut), and would convince everyone inside that WWIII had happened. Using an actual nuke would have been counterproductive because it would have irradiated your breeding stock.
Thurman was convinced that a nano war was coming, and on entry day probably deployed enough into the upper atmosphere to kill every human on earth. If there's anyone left alive elsewhere at all, then his entire project is utterly pointless.
Note that the vault exists, precisely to restart civilisation, because there's nobody else out there.
It would be like sealing off Barnsley for 500 years to create a society that didn’t know about, say, plastic, and leaving a vault outside the sealed off area with loads of stuff in that nobody else touched because of the reason, and also you were so scared of your future civilisation knowing about plastic that you were willing to kill your self and your coworkers because you know about plastic, and by the way, the rest of the world is out there knowing about plastic and could rescue you at any time by just walking up and knocking and just decides not to, and by the way you literally have radios which you could use to call for help and they could hear you and you would hear them, and planes, which you would see in the night sky flying past, etc etc etc.
Humanity being dead is a central plot point. The entire premise makes zero sense if it’s not.
It’s all very well for us to fret about the degradation likely to result from using hallucinating LLMs to replace humans to write and summarise stuff but we shouldn’t forget that the AI matrices are in fact excellent analogues for the fault-and-prejudice prone acts of more humans than we hitherto realised. It turns out humans are fatally flawed at the population level. Crowds lack wisdom and make really poor decisions. And that will be the undoing of the species.
One of my favourite books remains William Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, first published in 1841, whereby we see a number of effects similar to what we have today. Shockingly so, in fact.
For example, while Mackay's account of tulipmania is somewhat disputed in its rather lurid details and occasional apocrypha, its echoes reverberate throughout the history of capitalism. Needn't look far for it: we do, after all, see it in the rush for LLMs and, earlier, NFTs, or, if you're not following tech -- Pokemon cards.
It's definitely a worthy read if anyone's missed it up until now, and it's kind of depressing that the parallels aren't immediately evident when it comes to distributed bullshit engines.
Local DIY barn is full of Christmas tat, except most of it looks like it’s been designed by generative AI. Upright boxer dogs wearing 19th century military uniform while looking vaguely cutesy and shit like that.
From the family iMessage, reproduced for your amusement:
Other day: I’m outside fiddling with the batteries in the automatic watering thing.
Sylvia and Zoe are in the bedroom. The patio door is open.
I refit the watering system, but it’s not fitted well and when I turn the tap on, it sprays water right onto the power socket that the outdoor WiFi access point is using.
The lights on the balcony went out, but some of the stuff stayed on.
I immediately figured out what happened: I’d caused an earth short with the water and tripped the RCD.
But I didn’t swear because I immediately knew that all I had to do is dry the water and flip the circuit breaker.
But before I could apologise to the other two, Zoe’s voice erupts in a blind panic:
“Sarah! Sarah! Are you ok?”
Me, “Yes. I got water on a power socket and tripped the RCD. Sorry”
Zoe, with massive relief, “we heard the click (RCD going off), and you didn’t yell and we were worried you were dead”
Upsh
... show more
From the family iMessage, reproduced for your amusement:
Other day: I’m outside fiddling with the batteries in the automatic watering thing.
Sylvia and Zoe are in the bedroom. The patio door is open.
I refit the watering system, but it’s not fitted well and when I turn the tap on, it sprays water right onto the power socket that the outdoor WiFi access point is using.
The lights on the balcony went out, but some of the stuff stayed on.
I immediately figured out what happened: I’d caused an earth short with the water and tripped the RCD.
But I didn’t swear because I immediately knew that all I had to do is dry the water and flip the circuit breaker.
But before I could apologise to the other two, Zoe’s voice erupts in a blind panic:
“Sarah! Sarah! Are you ok?”
Me, “Yes. I got water on a power socket and tripped the RCD. Sorry”
Zoe, with massive relief, “we heard the click (RCD going off), and you didn’t yell and we were worried you were dead”
Upshot conversation took away some matters to note. Mainly that the RCDs work (I already know this from accidentally grounding neutral while wiring a socket. That’s so annoying), and an action going forward: if Sarah does something that trips an RCD in future, she will immediately swear loudly.
Federal and state governments acknowledge the widespread presence of lead pipes throughout the country—NRDC’s new map reveals where they are. The EPA, states, and cities must act now to solve this problem.
@KayEllen_OTS I mean, fair, but I was born in the early 70s and as was recently revealed, that’s peak lead exposure time, and I’m not yelling “OMG ALIENS!” at random Boeings.
Bluesky T&S have shat the bed and basically told all trans people on the site to go fuck themselves.
I've turned off my fediverse-bluesky bridge. Still have the capability to crosspost there, but I'm not planning to now. Am getting better engagement here anyway.
@AllysonShaw @Natasha_Jay you’re spot on, that’s usually the venture capital tactic: get something to grow fast no matter what the cost (financial, ethical or otherwise) and then cash out by either selling it or an IPO (making it a public company traded at a stock exchange)
@Allyson Shaw @Natasha Jay 🇪🇺 @marlies They basically have no business model beyond “create a pool of content which someone will pay for”.
And generating harassment drives engagement, so it’s not in their interest to clamp down too hard on it. Their ideal strategy is “slightly less harassment than Twitter”
@Rachel Lawson @Roche Limit @krims Because they want to hurt you, and are responsible for lots of the things that have likely already made your life harder than it needed to be, and knowing who wants you hurt or dead is kinda necessary, if unpleasant.
It’s a bit like a mouse not knowing what a cat is.
@marlies @Natasha_Jay I just wondered why no one on Bluesky is talking about this-there seems to be a single minded focus on replicating ‘the old Twitter’ rather than considering the future of that platform.
@Natasha_Jay @marlies right- there’s obviously a lot of engagement just going on about this ‘dilemma’- I just peeked in there because I have friends who now only use that platform. It’s so messed up. Thanks for helping clarify this.
Makers of hypersonic jet also have several bridges available for sale.
Did it fuck reach Mach 6.5. Going about Mach 5 is fundamentally hard as fuck with air breathing propulsion because physics basically doesn't want you to. You pretty much need a rocket for that.
The same guy followed up with a news article about how the Russians are going to beat the Americans at stealth fighters (comparing it to an F117, a slow ass bomber that’s been obsolete for decades), by building one out of fibreglass (plastic).
Credulous cheerleading tankies are the worst kind. Believe any stupid shit as long as it’s out of Russia or China.
@Matt Hodgkinson The only weapon Russia has that actually works properly is the ability to throw expendable human flesh at a target until it gets exhausted. It’s low tech as hell, but very effective.
The rest of their shit is junk. Sadly they have so many nukes that at least some of them probably work.
"ngl like nothing is as blackpilling as watching cis people on here hem and haw and triangulate about whether or not it’s worth it to do anything for us, ever"
@Conor Mc Bride I mean, those of us left came through that and survived after a fashion.
But fuck me, it needs to be so much better for those who come after us. They could be so happy, and the fact that they’re being forced to endure what was done to us four fucking decades ago breaks my heart. Not all of us made it.
@goatsarah For me, it's different. It's the happiness of the people who came after that meant I just couldn't bottle it up any more. I don't want that taken away from them, even though I've wasted it.
Trans kids are a political football. Starmer is desperate not to give Badenoch the opportunity to have a go for rejecting Cass, particularly as the BBC and The Observer would support Badenoch in that fight. Streeting's sanctimonious claptrap today is about trying to look progressive in jackboots.
"Trans people keep pointing out that transphobia is the spearhead for all kinds of other fascisms, and people keep choosing not to believe them, despite ample and repeated evidence that they are correct."
I think it's pretty disingenuous of the cops (LOL, obviously) and media to describe this as a "manifesto". This is more of a...vague confession-ish thing?
@artemis Disingenuous but very much intentional. Manifesto sounds scarier and implies coordinated or organized efforts. So it might mean more coverage for the media and more money for the pigs.
@Kalshann They also made noises like the reason they weren't releasing it was that it was really incendiary, but it turns out they already cherry-picked the most "extreme" quotations to share with the public.
Been watching the HBO Max Dune prequel thing and I’m thinking, Paul Atreides is like, “I am the product of a 10000 year breeding programme to produce turbo Hitler. I have enough morality left to avoid being tubro Hitler. Phew!”
Reminder that the research linking vaccines to autism was FABRICATED by Andrew Wakefield to discredit vaccination against childhood diseases: he was selling an alternative remedy. Never did jail time but got struck off the medical register here in the UK for LYING.
The anti-vaxxer ball he started rolling has now probably killed millions, thanks to COVID19, flu, and other illnesses.
Keeping an open mind, and exercising healthy scepticism, are always good ideas, but this must extend to all research findings, not only those that suit our prejudices.
With autism, it's also important to remember that it refers to a spectrum, and the descriptions 'unconventional' and 'non-normative' might be accurate, but are not really adequate to its extremes, for example where people are entirely non-verbal and need 24-hour support.
(I'm the parent of an autistic daughter, by the way.)
Specifically MMR (measles, mumps,rubella) which are devastating, but vaccine-avoiding parents benefitted from the protection, so don't realise how terrible the effects of those illnesses were, and are becoming again.
What is the science behind the anti-vaccine movement, and is it any good? Let’s find out!My Twitter: https://twitter.com/hbomberguyMy Patreon: https://www.pa...
@noodlemaz @kirrus … Okay, I'll allow a limited exception for informational videos where the narrators costumed in the style of Gilbert & Sullivan sing the text. "I have a little list / of anti-vaxxers who won't be missed …"
@kirrus @irina All very fair, but people who aren’t you don’t know any of that. And now the video is readily available ad-free to other people following this conversation who aren’t you and who have the inverse problem with large bodies of text 🤷🏽♀️ If your intent with this thread was public information, that’s a good thing, right?
Philosophy question: a randomly selected UK journalist or medic is told that a 40 megatonne hydrogen bomb will go off in London unless they write 5 sentences about trans people without deliberately lying.
Imagine being someone like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel and suddenly realising that your main legacy is for your obituary to get mostly laugh reacts on Facebook.
If you are a cis woman athlete, and trans women have been banned from competing in the women's category in your sport, a good way to show solidarity would be to refuse to compete in the women's category too.
It would be nice to see people doing this to help an entirely unjustified attack on us, but I feel it's unlikely to happen 😞
"If you're cis, one thing I'd like to impart with regards to trans people is that you are being lied to on an almost unfathomable scale, from billionaires like Musk, to religious fundamentalist groups, to print and broadcast media, to entire governments, they're committed to spreading malinformation."
The number of cis people who claim to have a working understanding of biology but don't know what hormones do, e.g., that trans women grow our own breasts, and still insist on having loudly wrong opinions about our healthcare.
One of the reasons this moral panic propaganda campaign works so well on cis people is that even many of our so-called "allies" are largely ambivalent and don't follow up to learn more.
Whereas literally every trans person has to become an expert in their own healthcare if they want to get anywhere. And then we get treated as "weird obsessives" for knowing so much about this stuff. 🙄
I fear cis allyship is largely a form of benign neglect and indulgence, which falls apart instantly as soon as they themselves are subjected to pressure and scrutiny from other cis people.
Which is to say, most of you wouldn't last five minutes as a trans person. Because that's just our daily reality.
People insist on putting children through violent, terror-filled psychological meat grinders just to prove we're serious about this and then all we get is a pat on the shoulder and a "gosh, you're so resilient." Those of us that survive.
I wouldn't argue with that. I'm my company's HR harassment training the most useful stuff is related to role playing harassment situations and what we, the un-harassed can do to intervene and be an ally. Even though it is absolutely the right thing to do and can make a huge difference it really takes guts to speak up and act. It's not something you can just put on your profile and forget about.
Interesting to watch American oligarchy join the “Charles Stuart, Louis Bourbon, and Nicholas Romanov club of having learned nothing and now wishing to explore the consequences of that”.
Only with a proletariat that’s armed to the teeth.
I've resisted dipping my toe into bluesky so far. There are one or two over there I would like to follow, but I'll keep resisting, as I did while they were on twitter.
Nowhere Girl
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Unknown parent • • •Just to add to the stew of misogyny:
Literally NONE of the men in my life who have suddenly glommed onto the "protect women's sports! protect women's spaces!" angle EVER gave a damn about women in sports, women's spaces, or women's safety, until that became a popular stalking horse for transphobia and transmisogyny.
(It's like how "Think of the children!" only ever means "We want to ban LGBTQ+ books" and not "free school lunches" or "gun control to end school shootings".)
AfroScribble
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