a world without trans people has never existed and never will

prints

SO!!!

WHO WANTS TO HELP ME BUY A SWITCH 2 AND STILL HAVE MONEY FOR THE CON IN JUNE? :')

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idk if this has been posted yet but i read this thread by @teamarimo and found it SUPER interesting and thorough and thought it’d be good to share it

This is good, just wish it wasn’t posted as a Twitter essay, they’re so hard to read.

[Caption: a series of tweets by twitter user @teamarimo. It reads:

the debate on who can use the terms “butch/femme” keeps coming up so i did a ton of research & i’d like to weigh in on the issue. i’ll post sources at the end

too many people credit anne lister (a historical lesbian) with coining femme in her journals but she was speaking french and “femme” has been a french word forever

going in chronological order of gay words in the english-speaking world, “lesbian” began as a synonym for tribade. “tribadism” = scissoring; both words meant women who slept with women & the sexual act itself. this was long before IDpolitics

so lesbian/tribade was something you did, not something you IDd as, bc they were labeled by their sexual activity since IDpol hadn’t come around yet. there was no concept of who was or wasn’t exclusively attracted to women. that’s why bi women are closer to lesbians than bi men

tribade dominated the 17th-mid 19th centuries until sapphic & lesbian took prominence. it wasn’t until 1892 that a neurologist used bisexual to describe sexuality. from then until the 1960s, bi was used only in academic contexts. it still wasn’t an identity yet

bi women have always been here but shared community with & organized under “lesbian” until (and even into) the 60s. before then, any text or study that said “lesbian” meant gay & bi women unless it (on the rare occasion) specifies otherwise, so context matters

butch/femme began in gay bars in the 40s-60s. women-only gay bars were frequented by lesbian & bi women. so for the first decades of butch/femme history, “lesbian” includes bi women bc there was no bi or “women-exclusive” yet & they were at the bars, participating in the culture

in the 70s, lesbian separatism begins with 12 white cis lesbians, the furies. They suggest that women engage “only (with) women who cut their ties to male privilege… as long as women still benefit from heterosexuality, receive its privileges and security, they will…

at some point have to betray their sisters, especially lesbian sisters who do not receive those benefits.” demon TERF sheila jeffreys says “our definition of a political lesbian is a woman-identified woman who does not fuck men.” this marks the split between bi & lesbian women

lesbian separatism others bi women who shared space, identity & oppression with lesbians centuries prior. it deems trans women as inextricable from male privilege they (don’t) have. it others lgbt woc who share oppression with men & therefore can’t exclude men from their politics

tldr it’s bad lol. with events like stonewall (1969) & increasing anti-gay violence in the 70s, anyone with proximity to heterosexuality in gay spaces was viewed as a threat & shunned. so bi groups begin to pop up, since they had no place in straight or gay communities anymore

in the 80s, 2nd-wave bi organizing was feminist bi orgs forming bc lesbians posited bisexuality as anti-feminist. by 1988, LGB officially separates lesbian & bi. now lesbians are invested in specific lesbian history & everything before the 60s says “lesbian.” see the problem here

texts with the word “lesbian” before the 60s are also referring to bi women but modern meanings of old words are applied to them, & consequently, bi women are denied a massive chunk of our history, including butch/femme culture

in the 60s, ball culture emerges in houses created as safe spaces for black & latinx queer youth. the genders are butch queen, femme queen, butch & women. here, butch & femme embody: the intersections of race, gender & sexuality; the freedom of it; and the resulting persecution

in the 70s, lesbian separatists say any form of masculinity harms women, materializing against butch & trans women. femmes are framed as wanting to reap benefits of heterosexuality while still toying with women (this is heavily wrapped in biphobic rhetoric too, if you can’t tell)

butch/femme is framed as heteronormative, anti-lesbian & anti-feminist. so androgyny is proposed as the lesbian ideal. now lesbian feminism is centered on white, middle class, androgynous lesbians at the expense of working class + nonwhite lesbians, bi women, and butches & femmes

butch/femme fall out of popular use, only kept alive by the same working class & nonwhite women who are ousted by white lesbians. butch/femme usage among queer youth of color includes lesbians & nonlesbians as it had since 60s ball culture & since 40s gay bars with gay & bi women

it’s interesting that people say butch/femme is for lesbians only when the beginning of lesbian as an exclusively-woman attracted identity & the downfall of butch/femme go hand-in-hand. it was queer youth of color who kept that culture alive, lesbian or not

white lesbian TERFs who demonized the culture embraced it again when genderfluidity became trendy in the late 80s. they claimed it as theirs, and stripped it of its history with bi women, trans women & queer youth of color that they wanted no association with

so that history was lost among many, and now well-meaning lesbians who definitely are not TERFs don’t even know butch/femme’s roots in race, trans/gnc identity, & class struggle, or its origins among gay & bi women as one group

tldr: TERFs suck, bi & lesbian women’s history is inextricable, and bi women were using butch/femme before the bi identity even existed. historically, “lesbian” encompassed a set of behaviors & became an identity later

Sources:

gay & bi women going to the same clubs: Source 1, Source 2

bisexual etymology: Source

lesbian separatism: Source

tribade: Source

butch/femme: Source

more on butch/femme; Source

origins of bi movements: Source 1, Source 2, Source 3

lady with history & women’s studies + LGBT studies degrees: Source

ball culture: Source

hi here’s a trans lesbian (homojabi@tumblr) saying exactly what I just said from a trans perspective for the “everyone’s trying to steal from lesbians” crowd. I’m going back to sleep

https://confide–nemini.tumblr.com/post/149527067504/is-it-okay-for-bi-girls-to-refer-to-themselves-as

end caption]

This was said by a guy (webcomic guy Tailsteak) but I don’t think he’s wrong:

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While we're talking about how triggers aren't one size fits all, can we also talk about how sometimes they're just plain stupid??

I can read, write, and watch rape scenes with minor discomfort, but a dubcon drunk makeout scene in a TV14 show made me shut down and turned me off of the show for a month because it reminded me of something that happened to me.

I can watch gore, body horror, and slashers galore with no problem, but watching people slice loaves of bread with razor blades on Bake Off made me feel sick because it reminded me of my own self harm.

Does it make sense? No. But that's just how it is for me. No two traumas are the same, and it's so selfish to think that someone exploring something traumatic in fiction, in any way, is a reflection of you and your situation.

You own what happened to you, but you don't have a monopoly on trauma lmao. You don't get to dictate how people write about these things. And you don't get to decide who is and isn't valid based on how they explore difficult topics in FICTION.

FELT. My own triggers can feel SO ridiculous sometimes because I enjoy incest and kodocon most of the time, but specifically male bjs make me severely uncomfortable. Like PEOPLE DONT TAG THAT ALL THE TIME, COME ON. people who get mad at fiction with sensitive topics forget that it’s important to talk about these things. People have gotten so butthurt lately that I’ve seen SO MANY pieces of vent art or books and movies about a REAL LIFE PERSON’S EXPERIENCE THAT THEY HELPED DIRECT get told they’re fetishizing the very thing they’re talking about. I understand not wanting to or not being able to explore your own trauma, but telling people they’re the very thing that they’re criticizing IN THAT MEDIA is very harmful, and they need to get out of their own head for two seconds and learn that.

Also, we don't owe you an explication of our traumas or personal history. I can understand that someone might want confirmation that my Native friend had input into the writing of Native characters in our group's fic, but she does not need to describe her reasoning and confirm her individual input behind every single decision in the writing of anything colonialism-related or confirm that every individual mention of the colour red is not my attempt at slurring her.

The people who police your gender will police your gender even if you're cis.

Eat them.

"OH those body builder women with pancake breasts arent-" eat them.

"This woman has a beard, thats not-" eat them.

"That man has a baby face, that's not" - eat them with barbecue sauce.

Eat them. You will never be gender enough for their definition of gender. Eat them.

only just remembered the conversation I had with the person who said they couldn’t read anything written by a lesbian because they were a bisexual and it would be seen as infiltrating a space that wasn’t intended for them and wasting resources that weren’t theirs to use and they were terrified of getting in Trouble.

“why are people afraid to read theory and history” the answers are sadder and more frightening than anything you can imagine

Once I was pottering around here on Tumblr and I stumbled across some random girl's blog and her pinned post was a multiple-paragraph tearful confession that she's fallen in love with a man and now identifies as bisexual so she'll be removing herself from her lesbian online community and she's so so sorry for the harm she's caused by violating their safe space as a non-lesbian, she genuinely didn't know, she thought she was a lesbian until this man came along and she's so sorry for accidentally deceiving the community and making them unsafe.

I think about that poor, poor girl a lot, and hope she found a healthier community.

Today is the anniversary of the start of the 504 sit-in, a historic protest that helped win disability protections!

I am once again begging you to get your hands on physical media and/or save your fave stuff OFFLINE.

How to remove DRM from Kindle with Calibre.

I use Kobo, which uses a slightly different method. Some publishers already don't use DRM. Great! You're good to go. Most others will be listed as using Adobe DRM. For that, you'll need Adobe Digital Editions.

Anyway. Not hyperbole. Microsoft closed its ebook platform in 2019 and people lost their entire libraries. Back your books up.

Amazon is ending the ability to download/transfer ebooks from Kindle devices via USB connection on February 26 2025!

You should still be able to use the PC and mobile apps, and in browser reading, but your device will be entirely reliant on WiFi (which isn't always available or reliable!). Here's 1 article on it.

I've been using Epubor Ultimate to remove DRM from all of my ebooks so I can convert and save them, able to read them either in Kobo or Kindle, or in Calibre. I can save them as Epubs, PDFs, or what have you.

Also keep in mind Bookshop.org, an online store that interacts with independent booksellers, now has an ebook app and options from those indie stores. You can even set it specifically to your own favorite local bookstores if you want.

I get a lot of ebooks due to space issues, being a rental/apartment dweller. So the cracked and converted books are saved to my PC and external backup drives. I bought them. They're mine. I ought to be able to read them, and not worry about them being "updated" or removed on some whim*.

-

(*I noticed that Jim Butcher's The Aeronaut's Windlass has a different cover than when I first downloaded it, not sure what else has changed yet. Good Omens also went from the classic black cover to the TV show tie in cover.)

my issue with the argument that "disliking ai art is inherently reactionary" is that it acts like pro-ai art people are somehow less reactionary on their views on art, when like the majority of defense's of ai art as like a higher form art are indistinguishable from the arguments people use to defend the art of like. hitler

like the logic is that hitler was actually a great artist, entirely hinges on the belief that "objectively good art" is just art that looks detailed if you've never drawn before, which like why ai artists who want to prove their actual artists will just make a pretty looking building or lady, cause it's all about aesthetics i guess

like i'm not saying your a nazi if you like ai art, i just think it's silly when people act like anti-ai artist's are just hysterical luddites, and that ai artists are the ONLY people who actually care about art, when 99 percent of ai artists on twitter only care about art that's "beautiful" on an extremely superficial level.

Jacob Geller dissected the intersection of Fascism and modern art in 2020, sadly before the AI art boom, and goes into better detail than I can about how abstraction is a threat to fascist ideals. I also want to draw attention to possibly my favorite commentary on modernism.

Comic by Ad Reinhardt, an abstract painter, who's made multiple comics about art and perception.

AI slop only bring repetition and lack of original idea to the table. it's an advanced form of stolen art collage. It seeks only to trace and multiply without provoking. It's the anthesis of art.

The way I explained it to my young cousin was like this:

Back before cameras, paintings were just recording reality, and that's why painters tried to be as realistic as they could, and only paint things that could exist in the world around them--objects, and people, and animals. Sometimes they did paint things from their imagination, but only to illustrate stories, like stories from their religion.

Then, cameras came along, and painters were free to paint things cameras couldn't see--things like the artist's feelings, or ideas, or thoughts, or lots of things. Some artists tried to see if they could paint from every angle at once, and we call that Cubism. Some artists tried to paint very quickly, as quickly as they could, so they could capture one single moment of the daylight, or their impression of a moment, with all the feelings light gives, and that's why we call them Impressionists. Some artists were more interested in the process of painting, like Mr Rothko; or in finding the most intense versions of a colour, like Mr Klein. Some were more interested in the spaces between things, like Mr Mondrian. But art, after cameras, could suddenly SAY something, say something by itself! And art, as it turns out, has a lot to say!

"I can do that too! I can do that!" You can, little friend! We all can!

My little cousin didn't get mad looking at modern art; she was excited, and asked her parents if she could have fancy grown-up paints, because she didn't know Art could be something she could do, could be something about expressing her feelings and ideas. This is a child who can't yet write very well, and not nearly as fast or as well as she speaks, so you have to understand something clicked for her, that she could express the complex human things inside herself with colour and shapes and images, instead of struggling to learn how to spell "melancholy" or "excited" or conjugate verbs to a degree that could encompass it.

Because words take TIME to master as an art form--I should know, I've been practising using them to express MY ideas and feelings artistically for 36-and-a-half years! Paint, however, doesn't require such mastery in order to begin expressing the artist; certainly it helps to know skills, but it isn't as required as it is with words. You can just scream and yell with paint, you can experiment more purely with images than with sounds, which after all are regimented into languages before we can begin to use them at all, let alone for the art words make.

And honestly, why are whole-ass adults not understanding that "I could make that!" should be exciting, should inspire you to go and make that! Why are you so mad? "I could make that!" Yes you can! And you get to! And you're an adult, you don't have to ask your parents to buy you paint and canvas and brushes, you can go and do that yourself and be expressing your own feelings this very afternoon! Nothing is stopping you! You don't NEED that plagiarism machine, you can do better art yourself! And nobody else in the whole world, now or in the past or in the future, is EVER going to be able to make the art YOU can make, the art YOU have inside you! So go make it!

#this is mostly it. to me.#like yeah it’s upsetting to see people’s hard work stolen (as has happened to friends of mine)#and for the environment to be destroyed in the process#but what stings so bad is all of that is done to create something utterly empty#nobody uses ai to create art - they create pictures#they have nothing to say and no meaningful connection to their output#most of the time they just want a weirdly shiny image of a big titty anime girl in an asymmetrical muscle car#or they want social media clout but are talentless losers (as are most ppl who give a shit abt social media clout)

the question isn't really "does fiction affect reality" but "will fiction cause someone to molest their family members or children?", obviously watching a cooking anime will make you hungry etc etc.

The metaphor can be extended. Watching a cooking anime episode about sushi wouldn't make me hungry because I hate sushi, for example. Thus implying that if consuming fiction makes you want to do a thing, it's something you were already predisposed to wanting to do, right?

This but also the person who you forced to carry a fetus to full term could’ve cured cancer. Or you know if the government didn’t slash cancer research funding those people could’ve cured cancer.

cool so you can hide ads for knowing too much now

hey!

hey!

probably don’t do this!

when you tell facebook an ad “knows too much” you’re essentially confirming that their advertisement algorithm is working, it’s just making people uncomfortable because it’s working too well

it’s still positive feedback on them trying to either flood people with advertisements or socially engineer you into buying things by tracking frankly enormous amounts of data on your location, the other websites and apps you use, your conversations recorded through your phone, everything

instead? just mark all ads as "repetitive” or “irrelevant”- something that doesn’t give them information on how well the ad catered to your tastes.

don’t give huge creepy corporations valuable information on your ad tastes. they will use it against you in any way they can.

TL;DR people with OCD do infact hyperanalyze every single thing we do or say or think to avoid being bad people, because being a bad person is literally our nightmare and we were born believing we're monsters and must spend our lives repenting for the crime of existing. Don't make it worse by telling someone that openly enjoying a hugely popular genre of art makes them suspicious and will stop them from making friends or being treated kindly unless they constantly repent in the form of saying they don't hate marginalized people. This shit is a nightmare for us, and again, you are hurting marginalized people in your quest to save them and that's really frustrating from the other side. If you care about people in your communities who have OCD you should be cognizant of what might make your spaces incredibly hostile for us. I already have my OCD telling me I'm a disgusting awful person who doesn't deserve to be treated like a human because I'll hurt everyone I love by accident, I don't need real people telling me they think my mental illness is right.

Also I want to make it clear, the main focus for treatment of OCD is not feeding the fear. We have to learn how to not obsess over our fears or soothe with our rituals because the more we indulge the worse they get. The idea is to learn to live with these horrible thoughts by refusing them space in your mind, it's essentially exposure therapy, you want it to eventually stop bothering you when you think about it. For me this means I have to trust when food I opened like two days ago isn't bad and not obsessively smell it and check the expiration date or spend hours googling how long an opened bag of shredded cheese is good for, or not getting up and pacing my house 2-3 times a night because I heard a weird noise and am convinced someone is trying to break in and kill me.

When you tell people that liking a certain thing or not being able to perform goodness to your standard you are feeding the fear, you are actively sabotaging your mentally ill friends' ability to learn to manage their illness by telling them their obsessions about being a bad person are true and they need to compulsively apologize with both words and actions to make it clear they aren't evil. You are reinforcing the OCD, making it harder and harder for those of us with it to take care of ourselves and heal. It's okay if you didn't know, that's why I'm making this post, but I really would love to see this kind of behavior fall out of fashion as soon as possible, so talk to your friends with OCD and figure out how you can support them. Because we really need it, and people with OCD deserve to be treated better.