This is the fabulous trans lobster of luminous gender. She only appears once every ten thousand years. Gender affirmation will come to u but only if u comment A R T H R O P O D
“Imagine knowing that every aspect of your physiology, from your height to your cup size, was chosen off a menu — not by nature but by doctors and family members.
From the second I was born, decisions were made by medical professionals about which of two gender categories my body should fit into. For me, surgery to remove my gonads as an infant was the first stop on the track to female — but the train didn’t stop there. My family was consulted about how 5 feet 8 inches seemed like an optimal height, and informed on how hormone levels and sequences could be measured to achieve just that. The ideal breast size for my frame was also discussed; I can still remember the male doctor nodding approvingly. I was also given a dilator before even hitting my teens, so my vagina would be ready for penetrative sex.
“Disconcerting” would be one — euphemistic — way to put it.
I was born intersex, with XY chromosomes but Complete Androgen Insensitivity. If you’re not sure what that means, I don’t blame you. By some estimates, almost 2 percent of the world’s population is intersex like me but is still living in the shadows because of societal stigma and shame. Stigma knows no borders, and neither did my body, apparently: I didn’t respond to androgen hormones in the womb, and thus stopped developing at a certain point — a point between what we consider to be the binary sexes, hence “intersex.” I was ultimately born with female anatomy on the outside but with internal testes instead of ovaries. As a result, doctors, alongside my parents, decided when I was still a baby that I would be raised as a girl. This decision has shaped the course of my entire life but was made without my consent.
I woke up Sunday morning to the news that the Trump administration is planning changes to federal civil rights laws that would define sex “as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals a person is born with,” and that any confusion would be clarified through genetic testing. Most people have interpreted this effort as a blow to transgender rights — and it is. But amid all this, the fate of intersex people seems to have been forgotten.
Where would such a change leave me? My body would throw this Trumpian test for a loop — my naturally occurring genitalia don’t match the “correct” genetic code in this forced-binary paradigm that seeks to override biology.
Here’s another curveball: What Trump’s memo defines as “unchangeable” is anything but. I know this because the process of realizing a gender via hormones and surgeries, analogous to the process the administration is seeking to marginalize and discourage among trans people, is one imposed on intersex children all the time — but in our case, it’s done before we can understand or agree. It’s not just the government that is forcing an unnatural gender binary; medicine has been doing so for ages.
The gonadectomy surgery performed on my body was internal but opened the floodgates for a sequence of physical alterations that would affect my appearance and identity. Any subsequent decisions made about my body that involved me, at an age of informed consent, were constrained by this first choice: to render me traditionally female. Regardless of my liminal genetic code — or rather, regarding it as a threat to societal norms — the train to my idealized gender presentation had already left the station. Why were all these decisions fast-tracked onto my body? Not because they were medically necessary — I would have been perfectly healthy just living and growing as little old me — but because they were vital to “normalize” me.
The desire to force-fit people into societally conditioned boxes has led to sterilizing children and enacting medically unnecessary surgeries on them. These surgeries are irreversible, lead to physical and emotional scarring, and their subjects are un-consenting. They are, to put it bluntly, the coercive application of Western cultural ideals to everyday human bodies.
Now the Trump administration wants to make these ideals the official preferences of the state.
I’ve experienced firsthand the consequences of the gender binary in what’s often a non-binary world. It isn’t good for anyone. Certainly not trans people, but also not for a population that’s larger than many think — and that has spent years trying to convince people that our bodies are good enough as they are.
Even though the administration is calling for clearer lines, we can use this as an opportunity to explore the beauty of the blur. And while our current administration proactively works to enshrine a false binary in our laws, we too can take action and give agency to those whose bodies don’t adhere to it. Until this point, we’ve lived in a state of defense — fielding constant assaults on our existence. This is our opportunity to mount a strong and overdue offense, rooted in love and understanding. One day, maybe soon, they will give up the game of trying to erase us.”
In an effort to both allocate space for and document the existence of masculine women, photographer Meg Allen created a powerful series of portraits for an exhibit at Cafe Gabriela in Oakland, Calif.
Entitled BUTCH, Allen’s series not only represents genderqueer women for a broader, heteronormative audience, but reaffirms butch identity within the queer community at a time when “butch flight,” or gender transitioning, is arguably becoming more and more commonplace. It is, as Allen says on her website, “an homage to the bull-daggers and female husbands before me, and to the young studs, gender queers and bois who continue to bloom into the present.”
all these truscum/transmed blogs are by like… 16-yr-olds
who is telling these children this bullshit
and can they stop
@onionjuggler augh that’s really true. I was also very vocal when I thought I had an important piece of information that others were ~ignorant~ of. I guess it’s probably somewhat universal?
I wonder what the solution is. cuz like, if I was convinced, and had been given information in the context of “people will argue with you because they don’t want to HEAR the TRUTH”… I probably would have argued righteously and not really listened at all. hmm hmm.
I guess this is why straight men don’t like to talk about their issues with friends because it always turns into a joke.
this absolutely broke my heart.
#BlackMentalHealthMatters
Smh It’s Always A Joke
This why I can’t fuck with a lot of people cause it’s always just a joke
😡💔
I will never say that men can’t get raped too BUT in order for her to ride him .. does he not have to be aroused ? That’s what I’m always lost on.
The penis has nerves that when stimulated will cause a reaction. Just because he was erect doesnt mean he wanted it. Guys wake up on hard not because we’re necessarily horny, but because our testosterone production is at its highest in the wee hours of the morning. Again, does not mean we want sex.
i mean that most women engage in disordered eating habits. what is unclear about that? how many women do you know who DON’T binge, purge, fast, restrict, go on diets including fad diets, go on cleanses including juice cleanses, count calories, count other things they can use as proxies for calories, count the calories they burn, peg their food intake to something other than hunger, use food to control their emotions, treat food as something they must earn and don’t always deserve, exercise compulsively, restrict or eliminate certain food groups based on nutritional pseudoscience, categorize foods as good and bad, experience feelings of self loathing based on what they’ve eaten, or use their abstention from food and control of their bodies and therefore food intake to attain feelings of purity, transcendence, or fulfillment? don’t try me.
“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”
tl:dr summary: “We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments.”
alder-knight 