Pinned
Oh nice post about bisexual issues. I like to support bisexual people. Let me just check the op though and oh no there’s a panphobe
Oh nice post about transgender issues. I’m a transgender. Let me just check and oh no they’re an nbphobe
Oh nice post about lesbian issues. I like to support lesbians. Let me just check and oh no it’s a radfem
hi, i'm a fat person who is just starting to learn to love and appreciate my body and i'm very new to the fat community and all that.
i was wondering if you could maybe explain the term ob*se and how it is a slur. i've never heard anything about it being a slur before(like i said, i'm very new here) and was wondering if you could tell me the origin and history of the word or mayy provide links to resources about it? i want to know more about fat history and how to support my community but i'm unsure of how to start
Welcome!
Obesity is recognized as a slur by fat communities because it's a stigmatizing term that medicalizes fat bodies, typically in the absence of disease. Aside from the word literally translating to "having eaten oneself fat" in latin, obesity (as a medical diagnosis) straight up doesn't actually exist. The only measure that we have to diagnose people with obesity is the BMI, which has been widely proven to be an ineffective measure of health.
The BMI was created in the 1800s by a statistician named Adolphe Quetelet, who did NOT sudy medicine, to gather statistics of the average height and weight of ONLY white, european, upper-middle class men to assist the government in allocating resources. It was never intended as a measure of individual body fat, build, or health.
Quetelet is also credited with founding the field of anthropometry, including the racist pseudoscience of phrenology. Quetelet’s l’homme moyen would be used as a measurement of fitness to parent, and as a scientific justification for eugenics.
Studies have observed that about 30% of so-called "normal weight" people are "unhealthy" whereas about 50% of so-called "overweight" people are “healthy”. Thus, using the BMI as an indicator of health results in the misclassification of some 75 million people in the United States alone. "Healthy" lifestyle habits are associated with a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index.
While epidemiologists use BMI to calculate national "obesity" rates, the distinctions can be arbitrary. In 1998, the National Institutes of Health lowered the overweight threshold from 27.8 to 25—branding roughly 29 million Americans as "overweight" overnight—to match international guidelines. Articles about the "obesity epidemic" often use this pseudo-statistic to create a false fear mongering rate at which the United States is becoming fatter. Critics have also noted that those guidelines were drafted in part by the International Obesity Task Force, whose two principal funders were companies making weight loss drugs. Interesting!!!
So... how can you diagnose a person with a disease (and sell them medications) solely based upon an outdated measure that was never meant to indicate health in the first place? Especially when "obesity” has no proven causative role in the onset of any chronic condition?
There is a reason as to why fatness was declared a disease by the NIH in 1998, and some of it had to do with acknowledging fatness as something that is NOT just about a lack of willpower - but that's a very complicated post for another time. You can learn more about it in the two part series of Maintenance Phase titled The Body Mass Index and The Obesity Epidemic.
Aside from being overtly incorrect as a medical tool, the BMI is used to deny certain medical treatments and gender-affirming care, as well insurance coverage. Employers still often offer bonuses to workers who lower their BMI. Although science recognizes the BMI as deeply flawed, it's going to be tough to get rid of. It has been a long standing and effective tool for the oppression of fat people and the profit of the weight loss industry.
More sources and extra reading material:
How the Use of BMI Fetishizes White Embodiment and Racializes Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings
The Bizarre and Racist History of the BMI by Aubrey Gordon
The Racist and Problematic History of the Body Mass Index by Adele Jackson-Gibson
What's Wrong With The War on Obesity? by Lily O'Hara, et al.
Fearing The Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings
The reason fat cadavers are not accepted for medical programmes is that you need to cut through every layer of fat carefully. Which takes time, and lab sessions are inherentely limited in that. It's better for med students to spend that time looking at what organs actually look like in bodies. This isn't fatphobia, it's just .. the way dissecting bodies works? In the same way surgeries on fat people take longer because there's just physically more tissue. The alternative would be to force the med students who get fatter cadavers to do more lab sessions at weird times outside of the usual schedules. Or force them to stay over the holidays. Or not let them get enough time to do the lab work they need to. Which imo would be a bit fucked up especially when med school is already so difficult and time-consuming.
It’s fatphobia. Fat bodies absolutely need to be studied. To ignore an entire demographic of oppressed individuals in the medical field for the sake of convenience(?!) is violence. Did you even read the article? They called working on fat cadavers “unpleasant.” It’s fatphobia and it’s unacceptable.
lmaaooooooooo
So
Over and over, the argument being made, which I'm expected to agree is purely objective, logical, and unbiased is:
It doesn't matter if fat people die.
These are all arguments I've actually heard, and all by people claiming that they don't hate fat people, that they aren't fatphobic, that their argument is just common sense, and everybody knows it:
"If EpiPens aren't made with needles long enough to work on fat bodies, fat people with allergies should just lose weight." - It doesn't matter if fat people die.
"Fat people are a financial burden on the healthcare system. The NHS is wasting money on making ambulances that can accommodate fat people." - It doesn't matter if fat people die.
"The reason firefighters shouldn't have to save fat people from burning buildings is because they aren't easy to carry out, and firefighters can get injured in the process." - It doesn't matter if fat people die.
"Covid is actually a good thing because it's mostly only killing fat people." - It doesn't matter if fat people die.
"The reason so many doctors have patient BMI limits on who they will perform surgery on, treat, or even agree to have an appointment with, is because it's too hard to treat fat people." - It doesn't matter if fat people die.
And now: "The reason fat bodies aren't studied is because dissecting their cadavers is inconvenient."
It doesn't matter if fat people die.
There is nothing that's not more important than fat people's lives. Convenience, money, time, comfort, ease - nothing. Because fat people aren't important at all. We are expendable. We're actually not even something that gets cut because we were never being accounted for to begin with. We are worthless.
It doesn't matter if we die. Actually, if we all died it would be convenient. A bonus.
This isn't fatphobia, "it's just...the way it works?"
#It's so wild how often fatphobia is this extreme and yet always coming from someone who consideres themselves completely impartial#The most common fatphobic argument being expressed is literally that it doesn't matter if fat people die.#It is that extreme and yet so commonplace that it's entirely casual and most people don't even blink. Don't think anything of it all.#And I'm just expected to not be in a constant state of seething rage over it like how do you expect me to be normal in this world?#How do you expect me to stay sane? When literally even the most casually fatphobic people in the world can't understand why#fat people shouldn't have to die to save money or time or effort?
So I read this interesting post from the MensLib subreddit, about how men's issues are always blamed on men themselves and never on society. The post itself as well as the comments are a very good read in digging in to antimasculism & the ways in which feminism has failed to critically examine men's suffering under the patriarchy. For example (all bolding by me):
Here again, the problems predominantly affecting women are addressed by changing society, while those predominantly affecting men are addressed by changing men (or by telling men to change themselves). The difference is not that one approach is right and the other wrong; they are both 'right' in the sense that they highlight genuine issues, but the approach to men's problems is more superficial. When dealing with men's problems, we focus on the immediate cause, which is usually the men's failure to cope with mental strain ("he should have gone to therapy", "he should have learned to open up more"); in contrast, when dealing with women's problems, we focus on "the cause of the cause", and try to remove the systemic social issues causing the mental strain, rather than telling the victims what they should have done to better cope with it.
I think this is a great point, and something we really need to tackle. OP also goes on to talk about self-repression, comparing girls avoiding sexual harassment and boys avoiding bullying:
Boys (and men) are notorious for repressing their emotions. They have a good reason: in boys' peer groups, a failure to control your emotions is almost as shameful as a failure to control your bladder; it is a sign of weakness, and any sign of weakness makes you a target for bullying and ridicule. So boys learn to wear a permanent mask of aloof toughness to avoid inadvertently revealing any sign of weakness or uncontrolled emotion, and many keep this habit into adulthood. It is generally well recognized that suppressing emotions is unhealthy in the long run, but it seems to me that the commonly proposed antidote is misguided: boys (or men) are told to "just open up more and be vulnerable" or to "learn how to cry", as if their reluctance to show emotions were some kind of irrational emotion-phobia, rather than a perfectly reasonable, perhaps even necessary, defense against the ridicule, contempt and loss of respect that society inflicts upon those who can't keep their emotions in check in the proper "manly" way.
It's something we don't really question in mainstream feminism. Women's issues have a societal root, and men's issues are issues that men put on themselves, and therefore men just need to fix it themselves and change.
And while yes, we all have a responsibility to unlearn harmful societal teachings, just saying "men need to fix their shit" doesn't help anyone. I've been annoyed for a while at how people will react to men suffering under the patriarchy with "UGH they need to go to therapy", as if
No self-respecting feminist would ever react to a woman obviously suffering from the patriarchy with "ugh, she needs to go to therapy and fix herself." Yes, therapy would be helpful most likely, but that's not going to actually fix the underlying cause of her issues. So why do we, as feminists, think that "men just need to fix themselves" is an okay response to societal suffering under the patriarchy?
Who does this help? Who benefits from us ignoring these issues? Why do we assume that men's experiences under the patriarchy are so one-dimensional and that we have no responsibility for unlearning our societal biases around men and masculinity?
Someone in the comments also added this quote from the "perpetually relevant" I Am A Transwoman. I Am In The Closet. I Am Not Coming Out essay by Jen Coates:
Have you noticed, when a product is marketed in an unnecessarily gendered way, that the blame shifts depending on the gender? That a pink pen made “for women” is (and this is, of course, true) the work of idiotic cynical marketing people trying insultingly to pander to what they imagine women want? But when they make yogurt “for men” it is suddenly about how hilarious and fragile masculinity is — how men can’t eat yogurt unless their poor widdle bwains can be sure it doesn’t make them gay? #MasculinitySoFragile is aimed, with smug malice, at men—not marketers.
And then another commenter left this (and referenced bell hooks' work on men!!):
"Do you agree that we tend to approach women's problems as systemic issues, and men's problems as personal issues?" Yes, and there's even a name for this: Hyperagency. Individual men are assumed to be immune to systemic pressures because the people at the top of the hierarchies generating those pressures are also men. "And if you do agree with that, do you think this difference in approach is justified, or do you rather think it is a case of an unfair bias?" It's pretty clearly not rooted in reality. The idea that billions of ordinary men aren't beholden to the social constructs under which they were raised is just plain silly. I'd blame the empathy gap, but honestly I feel like it's more than that. Patriarchy hyper-individualizes every struggle a man faces as a way to shield itself from critique and gaslight ordinary men. The motivations there are readily apparent. However, we see the same blind spot appear even in more academic Feminist spaces (taking for granted that "Feminist" spaces on social media are hardly representative of the cutting edge of Feminist thought). bell hooks once postulated that some Feminist women are deeply afraid of acknowledging how little they understand about men, let alone taking the steps to broach that gap.
Another person explained hyperagency by saying "Every single individual man is a hyper agent who is just expected to bootstrap his way out of the patriarchy through sheer force of will."
If you are interested in antimasculism as a concept I think this is a necessary concept to learn about. You can see in a lot of little ways how we expect hyperagency of men & look down on men who "fail", and how men's issues are often either attributed to their own failings, or individual men are treated as though they have far more influence over the patriarchal system than is reasonable (i.e "well the patriarchy benefits men, therefore if men are suffering because of it they should simply make the patriarchy go away, it's their own fault" rather than seeking solidarity with them)
I'm genuinely interested in this, it's another element we rarely hear about (also really hope you get better)
thank you (both for indulging me & well wishes)
So its something I've thought about a lot because I've heard MANY feminists talk about how men are oppressing themselves, but often its said with a tone of "men are the cause of their own suffering, so I don't have any sympathy for them".
But I feel like this ignores how interesting the concept is. We tend to view oppression as an interaction between two (or more) classes, but I think its interesting to examine oppression works a class oppresses itself. People will say this as a way of brushing off concerns about men under the patriarchy, rather than taking it as a chance to view men as potential allies as another group suffering from the same system, because they assume that "men oppress themselves" means that individual men could just choose not to have the patriarchy, rather than that men as a class benefit from the patriarchy while also being deeply harmed by it because of the patriarchy's own way of self-regulating.
If you are in a class that oppresses itself, you don't have an enemy you can point to for why you are suffering. You can only point to yourself. I feel like this is why men's issues tend to go more or less undiscussed; outside of the reactionary "its women/queers/foreigners/etc. fault", there isn't anyone to point to, so its not seen as something worth complaining about. Women can very clearly point to an outside force that causes their oppression- women can point to how cis men have power over them as a class separate from themselves, and therefore recognize how unjust their situation is. But men can't; either you rally around a boogeyman thats used to justify further bigoted violence, or you don't rally at all, and simply accept that the system is how it is for you. And the patriarchy encourages this because it thrives on male suffering: it thrives on keeping men in competition with each other, on being constantly insecure and needing to defend their manhood under the threat of ridicule and violence and loss of self-worth.
Women's issues have become obvious because women realized & were loud about gendered injustice. But if you don't recognize something as injustice, or as a part of a system of injustice, you don't speak up. But cis women (who have always been the loudest voices in feminism) also aren't going to be aware of the intricacies of how the patriarchy treats men for the same reason cis men aren't going to be aware of the reverse. & feminism, for good reason, has spent most of its lifespan focused on (cis) women's issues, so even though many feminists have put time and energy into analyzing and making efforts to help men under the patriarchy, its not nearly as discussed and there isn't nearly as strong or active a movement centered around it.
& of course, that doesn't make the injustice go away. Its being caused by a wider social system that intrudes on every part & every level of our lives, and is primarily benefiting the wealthiest people at the very top who are situated to benefit from the entire kyriarchy. And people are still going to feel the injustice even if they don't see where its coming from or why. So when you have this unspoken, unnamed injustice without a large movement to call it out & connect it with women's & queer's issues, and many of those impacted are (often white) cishet men with un-analyzed biases, it creates the perfect spot for reactionary movements to pop up. They get their energy from this unrecognized pain and suffering.
In an HBomberGuy video on flat earthers, he talks about how a lot of the people who are into that are doing so because they have a deep feeling that the system is not working, something is deeply wrong, and no one is dealing with it- and they are right to feel that way. They just don't have the conceptual framework to point them to the actual reasoning (i.e capitalism). And I think the same applies here. It doesn't mean there isn't real harm done, or that it should be excused, but I think a lot of cis men out there are reacting to a valid feeling of injustice that they aren't able to correctly place. They may have biases against feminism which prevent them from getting into feminist theory, but also many cis boys aren't going to be exposed to feminism as something that's For Them. Growing up AFAB I 100% got the message, even vaguely, that feminism was For Me and therefore I had vested interested in learning about it. But for many cis boys, there isn't any messaging that feminism is in any way for them- in fact, either through listening to other men/boys or through shitty feminist memes about how men should die, they get the message that at the very least, feminism isn't for them, and at worst, that it's hostile to their very existence. And again, this is 100% motivated at least in part by misogyny. But the only reason people who were AFAB tend to be less aggressively misogynistic is because we have a vested interest in Not Doing That because its a clear existential threat to us- everyone in a misogynistic society is going to have ingrained misogyny. It's just that some of us have more chances to recognize that its hurtful.
So when you combine all of this, and the obvious benefits for grifters & fascists to take advantage of this, then you get MRAs and pick-up-artists and "women are the problem" type shit.
This is why I feel so passionately about men's liberation. People hear "men oppress themselves" and write it off as "men choose to suffer under the patriarchy" instead of taking the more compassionate road of "the class of "man" is made to be self-oppressive". Cis men shouldn't have to be oppressed in the same way women & queers are to be considered oppressed by the patriarchy. Its a cruel trick of the patriarchy that we assume that because something is true for one gender, the inverse must be true for its "opposite", like sexism is fucking quantum entanglement. We assume that because cis men don't have an outside oppressor class, they can't be "really" suffering, instead of saying that patriarchal manhood is a unique sort of oppression. And from there, we need to seek solidarity with cis men, and anyone else, who is suffering under the patriarchy. There are oppressive cis men, and cis women, and queers! But I truly think compassionate, pro-feminist men's liberation could allow a lot more men, especially cis men (& anyone else who might be classed with cis men without being men themselves) achieve feminist class consciousness. And then the fight against patriarchy & sexism would be stronger, and so many serious issues could get desperately needed activism.
& many people will argue that they should not have to have sympathy or compassion for misogynistic men. And I agree, you aren't obligated to do or feel anything like that. But we can't fix things unless we address their root causes, and when the root cause is suffering and injustice, hostility and cruelty aren't going to help. So either we can give up on cis men ( or [insert group here]), or we can be activists. And its fine to not be an activist if the emotional labor is exhausting. But if we want big social change, we can't accomplish that with this "well they suck so it doesn't matter that they act this way because they are suffering" attitude. Its the attitude of prisons, that criminals trauma & circumstances don't matter, all they need is firm hand to punish them and they'll start have more appropriate emotional responses to said trauma and circumstances.
If the way to solve problems is by addressing the root cause, and the root cause is suffering, then compassion is vital to solving the problem. There's no way around it. If you call yourself a vet and you have a hurt animal that's lashing out, hitting the animal with a stick isn't going to make the animal realize you could help it. It's just going to keep it in a state of panic that makes it even more irrational. And, sure, if the animal attacks you, get it off of you and kill it if you are in danger- but you can't call yourself a vet and then kill every animal that bites you. You'll just end up with a lot of dead animals that could have been happy and loving if you had just put your own pain aside and tried some compassion. Either do that, or don't be a vet.
the damage patriarchy deals as well as the method by which it regulates and perpetuates itself becomes apparent as soon as you recognize it's not an amorphous phenomenon but a heirarchical structure. it orders everyone by value; your value within the structure is relative to your participation in it. you are punished for failure AND for dissent. the two are often conflated. women have the distance from men to recognize the hierarchical pressure men levy against them; feminists often have the training to effectively articulate this process. men are at the core of it, in a constant churn of agent and subject, aggressor and victim, and thus can very rarely untangle themselves from the process for long enough to recognize it as anything extrinsic at all.
I can't keep having the same conversations about love languages, mbti, iq, bmi, "brain fully formed at 25" and shit over and over again...
these things exist on a spectrum from untrue to straightforwardly racist btw. so if we could retire them forever that'd be nice.
quick rundown so we can put it to rest:
BMI: RACIST! The original formula still used to calculate it was developed based on the measurements of white western men in the 1830s! With no effort to check whether they were malnourished or not!
One takeaway I have from all this noise around Imane Khelif is that a lot of grifters and TERFs had to make up a trans person to be mad at, which is really sad and funny. I feel awful for her.
My second takeaway is people think sports are about fairness? What? Since when?
Karim Zidan comes through with an article explaining all. True champion of combat sports journalism.
i was reading about that influencer who groomed and trafficked several young women (not andrew tate) and most articles mainly focus on the "exciting" parts of kat torres' fancy lifestyle and the novelty of a beautiful lady pimp, but what stood out to me is that those women very explicitly said that the prostitution laws in texas were a major part of keeping them trafficked. the threat of their own criminalisation and the fact no one could be in any contact with them without risking a felony (letting an 'established prostitute' into your car can be enough) is what prevented them from escaping even after the abuse was so severe the grooming wasn't keeping them at heel anymore. it's been said many times but the way a sex trafficking victim can openly say the state's laws were aiding her trafficker and keeping her in that situation indefinitely if her family's efforts hadn't resulted in being rescued from the outside and it'll still be fully glossed over in all the discourse about the case is nuts. i can't think of a more dire indictment
Me, spouting off armchair theory: You know, it’s far more common throughout history and among many cultures for people to live in large extended families. Where there’s no expectation that children will attain adulthood by moving out and living alone or in nuclear families, the burdens of homemaking and childrearing and eldercare are lessened, and cultural ties are strengthened. Perhaps modern Westerners are foolish for embracing a lifestyle that isn’t centered on this kind of interdependence.
Me, interacting with my actual family: I FUCKING LOVE ATOMIZED INDIVIDUALISM
I see your call and raise you, a proper extended family has developed a close relationship through a lifetime of constant daily interactions and comes with social cues and a social culture built from thousands of years of embodying the solutions to the problems caused by living together in tight knit groups. We’ve lost and forgotten these things and no longer understand how to structure the family and interact with each other using the social tools that make such a lifestyle quality.
Atomized individualism allows us the flexibility to live like uncultured swine without the constrains that would make living together viable and without killing each other.
@missing-found I raise you, as someone who actually still lives in a culture where an extended family is still the norm, it was always actually this terrible but women and servants (who were underpaid and treated terribly) were expected to take the burden of smoothing things over emotionally and physically too.
Maybe it’s different elsewhere but that hasn’t been my experience. And I’m saying this as someone who prefers to live with other people.
Again breaking my own ‘cation but this is A Thing For Me:
I’ll raise all of you: there has never actually been a point in human history where we all lived in magical healthy harmony of perfection and fulfillment. This is not something humans have ever had.
Atomized individualism is absolutely potentially isolating, creating loneliness, mental health problems based in isolation, alone in the burdens of homemaking, etc, etc etc!
and! at the same time!
Large extended families living in integrated groups have always been potentially toxic, coercive, and deeply unhappy, and always contained at least one subclass of people (if not multiple) who ended up doing unrecognized and unescapable emotional, psychological and physical labour.
These things are both true at the same time. Neither one of them cancels the other out.
The flat bench-line of human history is not happiness. It’s not fulfillment. It’s not widespread mental health and actualization.
It’s just survival. So people don’t need to have been happy and fulfilled and deeply healthy in their groups in the past - it just has to have balanced out on the side of survival, more or less, most of the time.
Humans are absolutely social creatures: we need other people, and there’s absolutely nothing about us intended to be Alone and Solitary. In fact overwhelmingly through history, “all alone” was more or less synonymous with “you’re gonna die horribly soon.”
That does not mean that the networks of other humans we lived in were naturally harmonious, healthy, supportive, emotionally functional, etc, etc, etc. In fact if you take five seconds to look at most history and folklore and stories and life-experiences, we almost always weren’t! Globally!
It was just better than being all alone, where you died and your life fell apart.
Were SOME communities more or less supportive and healthy for more or less the majority of the people? Sure. That still leaves times when they weren’t, and people for whom they were poison, because “more or less” and “the majority” still leaves people who just didn’t fit, or weren’t like the rest of the community, or had wildly competing needs. And that’s WITHOUT getting into anything one might actually recognize as “right” or “wrong” - that’s just about stuff where there’s no moral value attached.
Like loud people in groups of quiet people, or vice versa.
There is a fundamental challenge to being human that involves trying to create, maintain and nurture networks of support and connectedness and help that are at the same time strong enough to be supportive - to offer adequate hands to all the burdens of human life - while at the same time aren’t restrictive, rigid and mismatched enough to be absolutely toxic.
In order to rise to that challenge one of the things I think it is absolutely critically important to realize is:
Yes! Atomized isolation/individualism can be a pretty crappy way to live!
So can integrated “traditional” societies based around extended obligate networks!
Both options often suck and have huge potential downfalls and failure modes. Neither one is inherently and automatically going to produce Correctly Adjusted Humans because absolutely nothing about how humans came to exist is predicated on us ever being Correctly Socially Optimized and Emotionally Adjusted Humans. All it had to be was good enough for there to be another generation of humans who a) survived and b) perpetuated the cultural norms into the future and the generation after that.
Whether leaning more on the individual or collective side is going to be better for any one given person is gonna depend hardcore on their context:
- is the collective context they have available a good fit for them?
- is the collective context safe for them?
- are they in a position and life situation where they NEED continual contributions from other humans in their lives, or no?
- what’s their personality like? what do they find easier or harder?
And that’s gonna end up with a whole lot of cost-benefit analysis going on.
But there was never a time when Everyone Was Totally Happy With The Big Integrated Families And Things Were Perfect (but then we BROKE IT!!!). There absolutely have been MANY times when your choices were “figure out how to fit into a big integrated network OR DIE” so people sucked it up and figured out how to live. But that’s not the same as “we were all ~*perfectly happy and adjusted*~”.
On the other hand there’s DEFINITELY been historical contexts where being able to Get The Fuck Away From That Toxic Hellpit You Were Born Into was way, way better! … that at the same time doesn’t mean that humans aren’t massively wired as social animals and that there aren’t huge detriments to being isolated.
[Now ideally, right: we figure out how to both skillfully interact and create support networks that ALSO AREN’T harmful to the people involved, and reflect the needs of those in them for both company and autonomy. This is gonna take a hell of a lot of careful behaviour, careful thought, and flat out work, though, cuz humans are fucking messes at the best of times. *palms up shrug*]
/disappears back into Sitka and work
I never want to hear another cis person talk shit about trans healthcare ever fucking again.
How many letters from a psychiatrist did this man need?
How many years did he have to live as his desired height (on stilts) before he would even have been considered?
What was his mandatory wait time on top of that to make sure he "really wanted it"? How many asked him if it was reversable just in case he changed in his mind?
How many right-wing weirdos are threatening to fire bomb the hospital that it was rumored on mumsnet maybe did a procedure like that one time?
How many people have centered their personality (Height Criticals) around hating him and organize online mobs to bully and harass him?
A lot of people in the notes seem to be really missing my point (intentionally or not)
I'm not upset this surgery exists. The amount of fucks I give specifically about this surgery is less than a drop of piss in a hurricane. If anyone (cis, trans, nb, whoever) wants that surgery, great. I support you and honestly believe it should be free as should all healthcare.
What I care about is that he was able to get this surgery without having to deal with *any* of the bullshit that trans people do to get even considered to maybe be put on a list to be reviewed to get a referral to go before panel who will decide if they can begin to think about possibly beginning the mandatory wait period after extensive review (and at least 3 psychological evals in which one of the docs is from a specific part of Minnesota)
That's my issue.
Watch how quickly this surgery would be targeted for bans if even a single trans man thought about getting it. Think of quickly those gatekeeping "guardrails" will go up around this surgery. It would give you whiplash how quickly right-wing grifters will latch onto this and make it the next thing to use against trans people.
Last week, a seeming miracle came to pass: John Deere, the Big Ag monopolist that — along with Apple — has led the Axis of Evil that killed, delayed and sabotaged dozens of Right to Repair laws, sued for peace, announcing a Memorandum of Understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation to make it easier for farmers to fix their own tractors:
This is a move that’s both badly needed and long overdue. Deere abuses copyright law to force farmers to pay for official repairs — even when the farmer does the repair. That’s possible thanks to a practice called VIN locking, in which engine parts come with DRM that prevents the tractor from recognizing them until they pay hundreds of dollars for a John Deere technician to come to their farm and type an unlock code into the tractor’s console:
Like all DRM, VIN locks are covered by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 law that criminalizes distributing tools to bypass “access controls,” even if you do so for a lawful purpose (say, to fix your own tractor using a part you paid for). Violations of DMCA 1201 carry a penalty of 5 years in prison and a $500k fine — for a first offense.
This means that Deere owners are locked into using Deere for repairs, which also means that if Deere decides something isn’t broken, a farmer can’t get it fixed. This is very bad news indeed, because John Deere tractors are just computers in a fancy, mobile case, and John Deere is incredibly bad at digital security:
That’s scary stuff, because John Deere is a monopolist, and a successful attack on the always-connected, networked tractors and other equipment it supplies to the world’s farmers could endanger the global food supply.
Deere doesn’t want to make insecure tractors, but it also doesn’t want to be embarrassed by security researchers who point out that its security is defective. Because security researchers have to bypass Deere tractors’ locks to probe their security, Deere can leverage DMCA1201 into a veto over who gets to warn the public about the mistakes it made.
It’s not just security researchers that Deere gets to gag: the company uses its repair monopoly to threaten farmers who complain about its business practices, holding their million-dollar farm equipment hostage to their silence:
This all adds up to what Jay Freeman calls “felony contempt of business model,” an abuse of copyright law that allows a monopolistic corporation to reach beyond its own walls and impose its will on it customers, critics and competitors:
If Deere was finally suing for peace in the Repair Wars, well, that was wonderful news indeed — as I said, a seeming miracle.
But — like all miracles — it was too good to be true.
The MOU that Deere and the Farm Bureau signed is full of poison pills, gotchas, fine-print and mendacity, as Lauren Goode documents in her Wired article, “Right-to-Repair Advocates Question John Deere’s New Promises”:
For starters, the MOU makes the Farm Bureau promise to end its advocacy for state Right to Repair bills, which would create a repair system governed by democratically accountable laws, not corporate fiat. Clearly, Deere has seen the writing on the wall, after the passage in 2002 of Right to Repair laws in New York and Colorado:
These two bills broke the corporate anti-repair coalition’s winning streak, which saw dozens of state R2R bills defeated:
Deere’s deal-with-the-devil is a cynical ploy to brake R2R’s momentum and ensure that any repairs are carried out on Deere’s terms. Now, about those terms…
Deere’s deal offers independent repair shops access to diagnostic tools and parts “on fair and reasonable terms,” a murky phrase that can mean whatever Deere decides it means. Crucially, the deal is silent on whether Deere will supply the tools needed to activate VIN locks, meaning that farmers will still be at Deere’s mercy when they effect their own repairs.
What’s more, the deal itself isn’t legally binding, and Deere can cancel it at any time. Once you dig past the headline, the Deere’s Damascene conversion to repair advocacy starts to look awfully superficial — and deceptive.
One person who wasn’t fooled is sick.codes, the hacker who has done the most important work on reverse-engineering Deere’s computer systems, culminating in last summer’s live, on-stage hack of a John Deere tractor at Defcon:
Shortly after the announcement, Sick.codes tweeted how the fine-print in the MOU would have prevented him from doing the work he’s already done (including “a direct stab at me lol”):
As with other instances of monopolistic, corporate copyfraud — like, say, the deceptive Open Gaming License — the John Deere capitulation is really a bid to take away your rights, dressed up as a gift of more rights:
[Image ID: Hieronymus Bosch’s painting, ‘The Conjurer.’ The Conjuror’s shell-game table holds a small John Deere tractor that the audience of yokels gawps at. One yokel is wearing a John Deere hat. The conjurer is holding a wrench.]
working at a grocery store should be enough to radicalize anyone
when I worked at loblaws, which is owned by one of the wealthiest families in canada, we were not permitted to put baby formula on the shelves. it had to go behind the customer service desk, because too many people were stealing it. being that I'm of the opinion that no one should have to pay to eat, I pretended not to know store policy and put it on the shelves anyway. the cheapest of baby formulas cost more than a quarter of what I made in an 8 hour shift. and yes, this is the same grocery chain that pays minimum wage to the majority of their workers, and student wage to workers under 18.
I saw someone banned from the store for attempting to shoplift diapers, another for taking bread. you know the age old "would you steal a loaf of bread to feed your family?"? yeah, a grocery chain owned by a billionaire family will ban you for that. and yes, this is the same grocery chain that admitted to a price fixing scheme based around the cost of bread.
the store manager instructed us to keep an eye out for people who "looked homeless", and to watch them while they were in the store to ensure that they didn't steal anything. and yes, this is the same grocery chain that denied drivers overtime wages unless they worked over 60 hours a week.
and we were unionized! imagine how they would have treated us if we weren't! and yes, this is the same grocery chain that blamed product theft on their workers.
basically, seeing the way that grocery stores underpay workers while boosting their prices and having over the top policies to prevent people from accessing basic human necessities should be enough to make anyone despise capitalism.
yes. the fact that people can't afford to feed their babies is a fundamental flaw in capitalism, and me putting baby food on the shelves does not make poverty and the necessity for people to steal in order to feed their children my fault.
I put baby food out on the shelves. you know, where it's supposed to be? if someone can't afford baby food, there's no moral failing in having to steal it. in fact, the true moral failing in this situation is a multi-billion dollar grocery store hiking the prices of food so high that people have to steal it, then hiding food- which is a human right, by the way- behind the counter to keep it from those who need it
I work in taxes. One of the most amazing things I’ve come across is that in a number of countries, Japan for example, if your return is simple, one employer, nothing weird or strange, there is NO tax return. At the end of the year you get an additional report from your employer. It tells you what you paid in tax. Your employer takes care of it. It’s one of the normal benefits of having a job. No cost, no stress, no late night runs to the only post office still open in town. It’s just done.
The US system is stupid.
The solution to homelessness is housing.
Scalpers: There is a low supply and high demand for PS5s right now. I will buy up a bunch of them at market price just to resell at my new inflated price for personal profit
Average Person: Dude, you’re scum. This should be illegal
Scalpers: There is a low supply and high need for affordable housing right now. I will buy up a bunch of houses at their affordable price just to charge people my new inflated monthly price to live in them, without actually owning them. For personal profit.
Average Person: You may not like it, but this is a valid business practice and a necessary part of adult life. This is our free market at work, and-
Do you know about this ‘OGL’ thing people are yelling about? You’re more plugged in to the hobby than I am; is it true that this would effectively give WotC/Hasbro a monopoly over anything D&D, but not over non-D&D TTRPGs?
In brief, the "OGL", or Open Game License, is a content license under which Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition – and, later, 5th Edition as well – were released. (Editions of D&D prior to 3E pre-date the OGL, and 4th Edition was never released under the OGL for reasons that are beyond the scope of this post.) This license basically lets you copy-and-paste rules and other mechanical content from D&D's System Reference Document (SRD) verbatim and use it in your own products – including commercial products – in exchange for agreeing to abide by certain restrictions.
Sometimes you'll see folks arguing that the OGL is technically pointless or some sort of scam because you can't copyright game rules, and the latter is true as far as it goes; however, copying-and-pasting the verbatim text describing those game rules can still land you in hot water. The ability to engage in such verbatim copying-and-pasting without fear of repercussions is Kind Of A Big Deal™ when you're developing for something as complicated and crunchy as D&D is, to the point that doing so would be entirely impractical for most independent publishers without it.
The upshot is that the OGL is almost single-handedly the reason that there are so many D&D clones out there – including D&D's largest competitor, Pathfinder, whose first edition is basically just Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition with the serial numbers filed off. (Pathfinder 2nd Edition is much less of a direct clone.) Some publishers who produce non-D&D content have also published their games under the OGL in the hope of fostering similar third-party support, mostly without a great deal of success.
Now, as to the cause of the present furor:
The forthcoming One D&D (sometimes called 6th Edition or 6E by fans) is slated to be released under an updated version of the OGL with much more restrictive terms. By itself, this is nothing new: as noted above, 4E was also released under a more restrictive license, and apart from screwing over a handful of third-party publishers who'd engaged Wizards of the Coast with a separate System Trademark License to allow them to publish products with D&D branding as well as D&D mechanics, the only major effect was to sharply diminish the amount of third-party support that 4E received – matters were otherwise business as usual.
The problem is that the actual terms of 6E's updated license were leaked last week, and not only are its terms enormously more restrictive than those of the original OGL, the language of those terms strongly suggests that Hasbro and WotC believe they've identified a legal loophole in the original OGL's wording which will allow them to revoke it retroactively, thereby placing all existing OGL products which contain copied-and-pasted content from the D&D SRD in violation of WotC's copyrights unless they immediately agree to the updated OGL. Leaked internal documents further suggest that they intended to do so with less than a week's notice.
At this point it's unclear whether Hasbro and WotC actually intend to try to retroactively revoke the original OGL, or whether the intent of this verbiage is merely to establish that any games published from that point forward must be governed by the revised OGL, even if they make use of content that was originally published under a different OGL version. It's also unclear whether any of this would be enforceable in court – there's a strong legal argument to be made that if a particular piece of content has ever been published under the original OGL, it's irrevocably available for use under the original OGL's terms, regardless of any future updates to the license.
Basically, the best case scenario is that the original OGL remains valid for all content originally published under it, the revised OGL applies only to first-party D&D content published after it comes into effect (i.e., all first-party 6E content), and we merely have another 4E situation on our hands. In a worst case scenario, things get interesting!
There's a reason why stuff is hidden behind "protecting children" or "anti-porn" etc., and it's to deflect scrutiny and wrongfoot any opposition. Because now any complaints or criticisms can be reduced to you wanting children to be harmed or supporting porn, or wanting it to be spread more widely and be more available to children.
None of these right-wing measures ever actually deal with the issues they say they do (because the right benefits too much from their continued existence and because they don't really want to address the issues anyway) and people get sucked in because they want to be on the "good" side and don't support (or say they don't) children being harmed or pornography being available.
Okay but this is what I mean when I say that nobody is going to be liberated until people stop being so possessive over the bodies of trans men and transmasc+ people.
te/rfs are literally just incels but with added feminism
And they can never prove why the trans man is "ugly" without showing their whole fucking ass.
"he's hairy now" - but I thought cis women not shaving and having body hair and celebrating it was part of feminism?
"but he has a beard!" - so do you not care about cis women with natural facial hair? Just gonna ignore the histories of cultures who historically found facial hair on women beautiful?
"he's fat" - so fat liberation isn't part of your feminism?
"he's balding" - Half the cis women on my dad's side of my family went bald. Are we shaming women for this now?
"he has acne" - so did you as a teen. was it helpful to call you disgusting and ugly? didn't think so. Body shaming isn't feminist.
"top surgery is disgusting" - so cis women breast cancer victims with double mastectomies are disgusting?
"bottom growth/surgery is disgusting!" - your obsession with other people's genitals, especially people who have no desire to fuck you in the first place, is fucking weird. But also - guess intersex women are gross now too!
It's all just body shaming that is both sexist and racist at its core.
