Like Clock Work

PHOTOS FROM r/50501 PROTESTS: 50 PROTESTS - 50 STATES - 1 DAY (2/5/25)

the transsexual that has suffered 10,000 quiet indignities does not stop dreaming of a better world

Y’ever read something and have understanding that has eluded you interminably suddenly stop, curl up, and snuggle neatly into a fold in your brain because a new way way opened to it?

fuck everyone who has ever tried to make me feel guilty about the amount of sugar in FRUIT

Congratulations to Thailand 🏳️‍🌈

Countries Where same-sex marriage is legal: ⏬

2001: Netherlands 🇳🇱

2003: Belgium 🇧🇪

2005: Canada 🇨🇦, Spain 🇪🇸

2006: South Africa 🇿🇦

2009: Norway 🇳🇴, Sweden 🇸🇪

2010: Argentina 🇦🇷, Iceland 🇮🇸, Portugal 🇵🇹

2012: Denmark 🇩🇰

2013: Brazil 🇧🇷, England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿, Wales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿, France 🇫🇷, New Zealand 🇳🇿, Uruguay 🇺🇾

2014: Luxembourg 🇱🇺, Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

2015: Finland 🇫🇮, Ireland 🇮🇪, USA 🇺🇸

2016: Colombia 🇨🇴, Greenland 🇬🇱

2017: Australia 🇦🇺, Malta 🇲🇹, Germany 🇩🇪

2019: Austria 🇦🇹, Ecuador 🇪🇨, Taiwan 🇹🇼, Northern Ireland

2020: Costa Rica 🇨🇷

2021: Chile 🇨🇱

2022: Switzerland 🇨🇭, Slovenia 🇸🇮, Cuba 🇨🇺

2023: Andorra 🇦🇩

2024: Estonia 🇪🇪, Greece 🇬🇷, Thailand 🇹🇭

Happy Pride Everyone 💐🏳️‍🌈

I can barely contain myself right now

holy shit

HOLY SHIT

I believe it was the work of legal scholar Florence Ashley where I first encountered this term (it might have also been Serano), but I’m becoming more and more committed to saying “degender” as opposed to “misgender.” like I think the term ‘misgender’ fails to properly identify the mechanism behind the process it describes: misgendering is not an act of attributing the wrong gender characteristics to a trans person, it is an act of dehumanisation. I think the term ‘misgender’ especially gives people much easier rhetorical cover to argue that trans women are hurt by misandry by being ‘mislabeled as men,’ or that they are in fact ‘actually men’ and benefit from male privilege, because the (incorrect) assumption underlying this is that when trans women are ‘misgendered’ they are being treated like men - to follow this line of thinking to its natural conclusion, this denies the existence of transmisogyny altogether, because any ‘misgendering’ of trans women is done only with the intent, conscious or otherwise, to inscribe the social position (and the privileges this position affords) of men onto them, as opposed to stripping them of their womanhood (and thus, their humanity).

The term degendering, however, I think more accurately describes this dehumanising process. Pulling from the work of both Judith Butler and Maria Lugones, gender mediates access to personhood - Lugones says in the Coloniality of Gender that in the colonial imaginary, animals have no gender, they only have (a) sex, and so who gets ‘sexed’ and who gets ‘gendered’ is a matter of who counts as human. She describes this gendering process as fundamentally colonial and emerging as a colonial technology of power - who is gendered is who gets to be considered human, and so the construction of binary sex is a way of ‘speciating’ or rendering non-human the Indigenous and African people of colonized America, justifying and systematising the brutal use of their land and/or their labour until their death by equating them to animals. Sylvia Wynter likewise describes in 1492: A New World View that a popular term used by Spanish colonizers to describe the indigenous people was “heads of Indian men and women,” as in heads of cattle. By the same token, white men are granted the high status of human, worthy of governance, wealth, and knowledge production, and white women are afforded the subordinate though still very high responsibility of reproducing these men by raising and educating children. Appeals to a person’s sex as something more real, more obvious, or ‘poorly concealed’ by their gender is to deny them their gender outright, and therefore is a mechanism to render them non-human. Likewise, for Butler, gender produces the human subject - to be outside gender is to be considered “unthinkable” as a human being, a being in “unliveable” space.

Therefore the process of trans women going from women -> “male” is not “being gendered as a man,” it is being positioned as non-human. when people deny the gender of trans women, most especially trans women of colour, they invariably do this through reference to their genitals, to their ‘sex,’ as something inescapable, incapable of being concealed - again, this is not a process of rendering them as men, it is the exact opposite: it is a process of rendering them as non-human. there is not a misidentification process happening, they are not being “misgendered as men,” there is a de-identification of them as human beings. Hence, they are not misgendered, they are degendered, stripped of gender, stripped of their humanity

reminders for today:

if you or someone you know might need it in the next few years, purchase plan b. the shelf life of plan b is 4 years, and we might not be able to access it as easily as we can now in the days ahead.

if you are larger/plus size: go online and purchase ella instead of plan b. plan b is less effective if you aren’t under 160 pounds.

if you can, purchase books that project 2025 is looking to ban.

mass deportations are starting. if you see ice vehicles or agents, yell ice raid and la migra as loud as you can.

if someone asks who you voted for, keep your mouth shut. they’re fishing for traitors.

if anyone, anyone at all asks about your neighbors or their legal status in the us, you know nothing. don’t be the reason that their family is separated.

if anyone asks about your religion or lack thereof, keep it vague. this administration will look for any excuse to persecute you.

your friends are trans or queer? for the next four years they’re not. don’t expose anyone’s status as a trans or queer person to anyone else, even if you think you can trust them.

did someone you know get an abortion? no, they didn’t. they were never pregnant.

in short, don’t be a snitch, and keep to yourself these next four years. we’ll make it through this even if it seems hopeless at times.

we can survive this. we’ve survived before, and we’ll survive again.