New Lino Print! Based On An Old Poster That I Saw Online But The Source Of Which I Couldn’t Track Down.

My Cat, Keiko Hiratsuka Moore.

now since tumblr apparently loves to support non-american authors, but is surprisingly mum about this, imma tell you.

you see, everybody's favorite evil corp, Amazon, bought Indian publishing house Westland some six years ago. Now Westland is a very famous and reputed publishing house in India, and has put forth some of the best titles the country has seen. It didn't shy away from controversial and uncomfortable topics, and some of its books quite vocally criticise the current government, which has been responsible for the current state of india as a pseudo-democratic, pseudo-secular, economically ruined country, the most notable one being The Price of the Modi years by Aakar Patel. It also produced Amish Tripathi's pathbreaking Shiva Trilogy.

Now here's the thing that got me nuts.

AMAZON. SHUT. IT. DOWN. A WEEK AGO.

JUST OUT OF THE BLUE, IT IS CLOSING DOWN WESTLAND FOREVER. NOBODY KNOWS WHAT IS TO COME OF THE HUNDREDS OF TITLES PUBLISHED BY IT, OR OF THE AUTHORS ITS CONTRACTED, OR THE PEOPLE EMPLOYED BY IT.

It has triggered a buying surge in India, as people go on shopping spress to get their hands on the titles they want from this house. Short on supply and high on demand, bookstores across India are showing solidarity and moving surplus books around.

here you go with a few links that i think sum up the problem quite nicely, and please guys. just. please support westland.

here they talk about how this is becoming a trend with global corps.

here they talk about the future of indian publishing houses.

this one talks about a bleak future for literature and how it feels like we're living in a dystopian novel

spread this around. jeff bezos continues to be evil, and will be. he is quite literally, irredeemable.

”Instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create.” ~ Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart … Artist ~ Carl Larsson

I think shifting my understanding of dysphoria from something I “have” to a set of feelings that I experience has been really fundamental and important for managing that dysphoria. This for me has meant that I no longer see myself as a person suffering from a condition, but I experience flare ups in dysphoria the same way I experience any other negative emotion, which is that I sit in it and it is uncomfortable and maybe it causes me some pain but that’s fine, and I note the feeling and ask myself what brought that feeling on and then I move on and do my best not to focus unduly on it. I think many dysphoric women especially have traded the constant self watching that is so central to how women are forced to do femininity, for the constant self watching that dysphoria can encourage, and in both cases it is not healthy to be constantly concerned with and trying to actively alter how you are perceived.

ive been thinking abt that “being a lesbian is just constantly the cant relate meme” and its actually so true it makes me sad lmao.  like my friends can rant for five minutes about how badly they want to suck some dudes dick but i feel uncomfortable even mentioning that im slightly attracted to some girl. so much of “girlhood” or “womanhood” thats portrayed in mainstream pseudo feminist media, or even coming of age literature is about the heterosexual experience; about a women coming into her (straight) sexuality and thats just so frustrating.  little women was hailed as one of the first books to write about girlhood and growing up and a lot of it involves all the girls falling in love with men.  also honestly the whole “sex positive revolution” thing is annoying and exclusive too lmao.  i read an article that cited sex and the city, 30 rock, magic mike (??), and amy schumer, as “sex positive media” thats contributing to a “more open discussion” on “female sexuality”.. while literally none of these are in any way relatable to the lesbian experience.  im forever grateful to alison bechdel, and anyone else who is making space to talk about the lesbian coming of age experience because we literally have nothing at the moment and it fucking sucks.

that reblog saying ‘If you don’t want to be a girl you probably aren’t one’ like.. if you don’t enjoy feeling like a sex object aged 10 you’re probably not a woman like WHAT. I think you guys need to like.. talk to more women :(

I often see more gatekeeping presented as a way to prevent detransition. And while this wouldn’t necessarily be useless, it’s a bandaid solution. Working harder to root out the “right” people to transition from the “wrong” people to transition isn’t going to eliminate transition regret. To get at why we have to ask, who are the “right” people? Are they the ones are suffering the most or who have been suffering the longest? Are they the most gender non-conforming ones? Are they the ones persistent enough to pass through checkpoint after checkpoint? None of these things insure that transitioning is going to work for someone: that it’s going to improve their quality of life.

When I walked into gender therapy I was suicidal and had been off and on since I was old enough to understand what death was. I was already being regularly mistaken for a boy. I was adamant that I needed this. My therapist called me a “classic case” and still we talked for almost a year before I socially transitioned. I then spent another year living “full time” before starting testosterone and spent my first six months of testosterone on a low dose prescribed by a fairly paranoid pediatric endocrinologist. I met every requirement. I passed every checkpoint. I didn’t take any shortcuts. And still, here I am: a woman, a butch dyke, further from normality than ever, bitter about what happened to me. Because none of those measures addressed my underlying problem.

What we really need if we want potential regretters to not be certain that they need this is a shift in culture. We need environments without misogyny that are affirming of lesbianism and gender non-conformity. We need girls to grow up free from abuse, supported in their mental health and knowing that they can be anything they want to be and anything they are. We need to encourage them to love and live in their bodies and provide immediate solutions if they find that they can’t. Because by the time that many girls step into a gender therapist’s office they’ve already made up their minds, for good reason, that they can’t live this way. 

Justice RBG's death has just been announced, what happens now? I'm terrified of what's going to happen if the GOP manage to replace her; I don't know if they even CAN, if there's enough time, or if that could somehow be prevented until after the inauguration. I don't know what's going to happen next but I'm afraid of what this will mean.

Not to be an anarchist on main but the answer is always:

Connect with your local communities to share resources and make sure everyone is safe.

learn new skills whenever you can, especially survival, communication, and first aid skills. Look for CERT trainings as a good source of free classes and hands-on education.

join and support unions whenever possible.

look to the activists of the past for guidance: if the ACA is overturned start staging die-ins (and if you’re a medical professional then now is the time to work with your colleagues to figure out how you’re going to provide care to people who are going to lose their medical coverage)

work local; the supreme court isn’t something that you can control, but maybe you can have an impact on your city’s zoning policies or on whether or not unused land becomes a community food garden.

do jail support, film cops, and listen to cop communications so that you can report on their movements to the people they threaten.

feed the hungry.

hack the planet.

If not you then who? If you see a need, fill it.

Take care of yourself and take care of each other.

Shit is fucked up, the government is fucked up, the world is fucked up. It probably won’t always be that way, but right now all that you can do is make the part of the world that you’re in contact with a little better, so do that.

If you aren’t detransitioned yourself, you don’t get to tell people the “reasons” for detransition with any kind of authority on the matter. You don’t get to tell detransitioned people how they must have experienced dysphoria or say that it wasn’t “severe” enough if they were able to find other means of coping than continuing to transition their bodies. 

I’m tired of watching non-detransitioned people try and speak over us, try and erase the variance in stories because some of them don’t fit a narrative they like, and consistently belittling our experiences. 

People who transition are only helped by having information on the varying outcomes that may come from it, no matter how small of a chance it may be. My doctor didn’t have me ignore the fact that my nipples could fall off after having surgery just because it was a less than 1% chance, they certainly shouldn’t have been telling me not to research about detransition for the same fucking reason.