i forget everything.
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  • riding-with-the-wild-hunt

    a whole bunch of gazan mutual aid projects and nonprofits. if the decision of which individual fundraiser to give to feels too daunting, or if you just want to help as many people as possible in one go, these are great initiatives to support.

    • care for gaza - focuses on providing food and essential supplies. donate here or here.
    • connecting humanity - securing internet access via donations of virtual sim cards (esims). if you can't afford a whole plan yourself, crips for esims is a communal pool that will use your donation to purchase and maintain esims
    • gaza soup kitchen - provides food, medical care, and classes for children. also has a gofundme
    • glia gaza medical support initiative - provides medical care through field clinics and tents at hospitals. donations can also be sent through their website.
    • ele elna elak - provides clean water, food, clothing, and shelter. they also have a gofundme
    • life for gaza - raising money for the gaza municipality to repair water and waste management infrastructure
    • taawon - partners with local civil organizations to provide food, water, medical care, shelter, and basic supplies
    • the sameer project - running various initiatives providing tents, medical care, and necessities. they have their own encampment project focused on sheltering families with children, sick and disabled members, or members in need of perinatal care
    • islamic relief worldwide's gaza emergency appeal - provides food, water, hygiene kits, medical supplies, and psychological support
    • baitulmaal - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, shelter, and medical supplies
    • gaza mutual aid fund - distributes food, hygiene products, water, and other essential supplies, including financial support. run by @/el-shab-hussein's amazing friend Mona. updates can be found on her instagram.
    • hygiene kits for gaza - provides hygiene supplies including menstrual products, wipes, and toothbrushes/toothpaste
    • anera - provides a variety of necessities, including food, water, hygiene supplies, medicine, blankets and mattresses, and psychological care
    • palestine children's relief fund - provides supplies and support with a focus on children. also has an initiative for lebanon

    certainly this is not an exhaustive list, so please feel free to add on other projects or organizations that i didn't include. and as always, please take the time to donate if you can and share. it truly makes all the difference.

    • 111,338 notes
  • macleod

    The image is a screenshot of a headline and subheadline from Retail Brew. The headline reads: "Target suffers eighth week of foot-traffic losses since caving on DEI" The subheadline states: "Costco, which resisted demands to end DEI, extends its streak of foot-traffic gains to 13." The text is in black on a white background, using a bold font for the headline and a regular-weight font for the subheadline.ALT
    The image shows the exterior of a Target store. The store's facade is brown with the iconic red Target logo and the word "target" prominently displayed above the entrance. Below the logo, there is a sign that reads "order pickup," indicating a designated area for customers collecting online purchases. The entrance has red automatic sliding doors, and a few people are seen walking in and out of the store. One person is pushing a red Target shopping cart with bags, while another is wearing a blue hoodie and carrying a backpack. The scene is set during the daytime, with an overcast sky visible in the reflection of the windows.ALT
    The image shows the exterior of a Costco Wholesale store. The building has a beige and brown facade with the recognizable red "COSTCO" logo and blue "WHOLESALE" text underneath it. The entrance features large glass sliding doors with a few customers visible inside and outside the store. The foreground has red bollards positioned in front of the entrance. In the background, there is a blue sky with a red and blue diagonal design element added to the top-left corner of the image, possibly for branding or promotional purposes. The image appears to be edited with these design elements rather than being a raw photograph.ALT

    Target saw foot traffic fall for the eighth consecutive week, extending a losing streak that began just a few days after the company announced it would end its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) program in late January.

    At Costco, which unlike Target resisted demands from the Trump administration for private companies to dump their DEI programs, foot traffic has continued to grow. For the same week beginning March 17, traffic rose 5.2% YoY, and marked its 13th straight week of gains over last year.

    No Woke? Go Broke.

    Source: The Retail Brew, March 2025

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  • feather-bone

    a pine marten standing in a field of wildflowersALT
    a white wolf on a snowy plain, with a bright sun in a dark purple skyALT
    a capybara with citrus fruits and text reading "take it easy"ALT
    many common north american urban wildlife labeled "neighbors", including a fox, deer, birds, bugs, and plantsALT
    a gila monster, turkey vulture, and fennec foxALT
    an elk portrait with leaves and flowersALT
    a black rabbit with the text "be cunning and full of tricks"ALT
    a bat hanging from a tree, holding a shining starALT
    rainbow fluffy noodle dragonsALT
    a badger with a monarch butterflyALT
    a stag beetle on a treeALT
    a bat flying with a shooting starALT

    I've been in "chrysalis mode" working on various projects and i haven't had much to share recently - so lets look back at some older works!

    I started working on moving toward freelancing in 2020 and since then I've made a lot of drawings I'm proud of. Here are some faves! Many are available as prints in my shop. :-)

    • 3,876 notes
  • fleshengine

    I think my biggest piece of evidence to “afab trans women are doing it for weird reasons” is that I know a handful of cis men who have tried messing around with their gender and gone back and forth and ultimately decided to stay men. They do not call themselves trans men. They’re just guys who are more confident in their presentation.

    I think it’s really telling that this happens to trans women way more than it happens to trans men (if it happens at all which I have not seen.)

  • queselevaaser

    I ask this genuinely and with no ill intent, but... what does it matter?

    So long as said "weird reasons" aren't hurting anyone, why should anyone care?

  • bite-my-grimy-fleshy-ass

    So, the AFAB trans woman thing is largely, but not necessarily a terf thing and generally rooted in transmisogyny no matter how you slice it. Going to break this down thoroughly and with no ill intent but the weird reasons absolutely do hurt us.

    Basically someone identifying as an AFAB trans woman is definitionally cis (for nuance see #3), because they are identifying with their agab. Them taking on this label serves a few purposes, none of them good, going to go over the two examples of AFAB trans women I've actually encountered, and one hypothetical I see people talk about but never actually encountered online or irl:

    1. Polluting the discourse and resources. There was an AITA about this that was rather infamous. Basically the AFAB trans woman was entering trans women only spaces and giving advice on HRT despite never having actually been on feminizing HRT herself. Presenting herself as a fellow transfem and obfuscating her agab in order to gain clout within the in group and not thinking about the ramifications of giving medical advice without life experience to vulnerable people. The reaction to the person writing in talking about how she warned people in the group this person had no experience with transfem HRT, both from the AFAB transfem and the tme tumblr community at large, was that she was "outing" her by doing this and being a bigot for trying to protect her sisters from bad medical outcomes.
    2. The TERF AFAB trans woman thing is largely a rhetorical move about deligitimizing trans identities. The hypothetical trans masc equivalent (which I've not heard of happening mind you) would be a cis gay dude saying he's an amab transmasc and as a transmasc he understands the need to exclude afab transnascs from sacred and safe amab-only spaces. I hope providing an inverted example helps illustrate how ludicrous that is. It's one of many rhetorical tools of transmisogyny designed to leverage a trans identity to exclude trans women from women's spaces.
    3. Now, best case scenario, your "not hurting anyone" this is an AFAB person who for any number of reasons feels like cis woman doesn't quite fit their identity. Often this person is described someone who due to experimenting with HRT or being intersex had "male" features like increased body hair or deeper voice. Now, if you think it's not hurting anyone for someone to think "I'm kinda like if a woman had a man's body" or "my identity is girl who feels like a boy" or "I was a boy for awhile before going back to being a girl" and go with trans woman I suggest rethinking that. There are any number of labels and identities to choose from, demigirl, queer, genderqueer, non-binary woman, genderfluid, etc, that actually describe these kinds of conceptions of gender. In choosing trans woman to describe this they are, intentionally or not, implicitly or not, defining trans women by our "maleness" and claiming the identity because of that. They are functionally Taking the negative stereotypes associated with trans women as men in dresses and claiming it as their identities. It's difficult to think of a hypothetical tme example for this one as it's very deeply tied to transmisogyny, but relating with the negative stereotypes about a group you do not belong to then claiming membership in that group because of them is absolutely harmful behavior. Trans womanhood is just as much about experience and the way society treats us on both an interpersonal and systemic level as it is about gender identity. Idk, best I got is picture a cishet man identifying as bisexual despite only liking women because he likes doing drugs and partying and hookups. Inserting himself into conversations about bisexuality at a local queer group saying shit like "hey any girls looking for a third?" This man is a swinger and maybe even polyamorous, and both of those things are ok and dare I say valid, but he is not a bisexual.

    Now picture any of these AFAB trans women writing articles or academic papers or essays or making YouTube videos or podcasts about their experiences as a trans woman, because they do. They'll say shit like the root of all hatred to trans women is the hatred of men. That trans women are a mystical third gender that is like if a woman was not a woman. That there is no such thing as amab intersex trans women and you're being intersexist if you don't claim AFAB trans women. TME folks, be they cis allies, other queer people, etc, read these and incorporate them into their understanding of what a trans woman is. Reinforcing all these transmisogynistic stereotypes from the mouth of a "trans woman". Newly out trans women read these and take the bad and unfounded advice in them, or decide they can't be trans women at all because they don't align with the experiences of these people.


    Someone's weird reasons for choosing a personal identity incongruous with the definition of the identity they choose is harmless only if you don't think about how they interact with and relate to other members of their community. Shit like this is part of transmisogyny just marginalizes actual trans women within our own communities.

  • 0w0tsuki

    2.2. Conservative logic that openly "takes advantage" of "all identities are valid" rhetoric where they say "well if you can "identity" however you want the I can identify as any ridiculous thing and you have to respect it". It's the exact logic behind the "attack helicopter" joke. It's treating the concept of trans women as a frivolous identity that's merely being respected. It's saying we are "transwomen" as opposed to women who are trans.

  • fleshengine

    image

    Genuinely could not have said it better myself. Thanks everyone for the additions.

  • catgirlanarchist

    i'm certainly not the first person to say this, but i want to emphasize one of the biggest problems with people who were assigned female at birth (perisex or intersex) calling themselves trans women:

    it is contradictory to the most widely accepted definitions of transgender ("one who does not identify with the gender they were coercively assigned at birth") and trans woman ("a woman who was coercively assigned male at birth"), and therefore makes it difficult, sometimes even impossible, for trans women to communicate with each other about our shared experiences and construct transfeminist theory.

    here's an analogy that i think is a lot more fitting to this, and a lot more revealing of how it's a problem:

    imagine if perisex trans people started calling ourselves intersex, because the effects of our transition caused our bodies to fall outside of the (socially constructed and enforced) sexual dyad, or because trans people are sometimes subject to misdirected intersexism?

    that would be clearly (and correctly) recognized as appropriation of an identifier coined by and for an oppressed group in order to form community and discuss their shared experiences.

  • transmisogyny-explained

    [Image Text: “#also in this conversation tme ppl always completely ignore tma intersex voices. like as [if] they don’t exist #while tme ppl who aren’t even intersex use it as a rhetorical tool to be transmisogynistic (and implicitly intersexist too!!) /End Image Text]

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