Quietly Thinking Aloud

freedominwickedness:

This is now the third time I’m writing on trans and intersex terminology. I am quite sick of this subject, and I am even more sick of people immediately jumping to the assumption that I must be a dyadic and/or binary-identified trans person simply because I disagree with them. This especially goes for certain dyadic and/or binary trans people who have taken it upon themselves to white knight for what they assume is “the” intersex point of view.

Congratulations. You have successfully bullied me into talking about deeply personal medical details which I do not want to discuss in public. I hope you feel damn proud of yourselves. I hope it’s worth it to you that you’ve stomped all over my triggers, given me the worst childhood abuse flashbacks I’ve had in years, and put me in a state of severe emotional (and physical) exhaustion.

For the record, I find it utterly sick that certain dyadics are so obsessed with white knighting for intersex people that they knowingly attacked an intersex person for disagreeing with their position even after sie explicitly outed hirself as intersex. White knighting is a completely busted way of trying to own your privilege in the first place, but white knighting to the point of openly silencing and speaking over a member of the minority you’re supposedly defending?

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As for the actual issues being debated, here is where I stand.

Up until last year, I — as an intersex person — did ask that dyadic trans people use the terms AMAB/AFAB instead of CAMAB/CAFAB, on the argument that dyadic trans people are coercively socialized as their birth assigned gender but not coercively assigned at birth per se. The reasons for my change in position are as follows:

• First, I realized that AMAB and AFAB push trans people right back into the problem they were trying to solve when they coined CAMAB and CAFAB as replacements for the terms MTF and FTM. The stripped-down terms once again tie trans people to their birth assignment rather than their actual gender. In fact, AMAB and AFAB are even worse than MTF and FTM in terms of tacitly equating trans people with cis people of the same birth assignment.
• Second, I realized that intersex people as a whole were failing to acknowledge that dyadic trans people were doing us a big fucking favor in even considering giving up a big piece of their terminology at our request. Instead, more and more of us were simply deciding that we were somehow entitled to exclusive use of the terms we wanted, either by rewriting history to claim that trans people had “appropriated” from intersex people or by playing Oppression Olympics.
• Third, I realized that intersex people involved in these arguments were starting to blatantly move the goalposts by demanding that trans people change their terminology again by giving up “assigned” as well as “coercive”. Frankly, I see no reason to believe that this demand is being made in any sort of good faith; if trans people comply, they’re just going to get the “at birth” part pulled out from under them as well.
• Finally, I realized that the entire reason many intersex people were picking fights over this issue in the first place was not that they wanted dyadic privilege to be acknowledged, but because they thought of themselves as “normal” and trans people as mentally ill and/or perverts. That’s why they were acting like Apple Computer patent lawyers and going absolutely berserk at anything even vaguely resembling the “look and feel” of their claimed territory.

In light of those points, I found that I could not in good conscience continue to support any effort to seek the redefinition of CAMAB and CAFAB as exclusively intersex terms, regardless of any per se definitions. Any term which fails to emphasize the fact that trans people’s birth assignment is nonconsensual and forced misgenders trans people by grouping them with cis people on the other side of the gender spectrum, which makes both AMAB/AFAB and DMAB/DFAB actively harmful to trans people.

I see continued efforts to demarcate a “hard line” between trans and intersex to be horribly misguided at best, willfully malicious at worst, and utterly counterproductive regardless of motive: trans rights and intersex rights are both fundamentally about reclaiming the right to bodily integrity by replacing involuntary treatment built around social compliance with voluntary treatment built around informed consent. We do not achieve freedom for anyone by prefacing it with institutional gatekeeping over who is entitled to autonomy and who doesn’t deserve it.

I’m bolding one of the points not because it is more true or more relevant or more important than the rest of the post… the whole post should be read… but because it jumped out at me because right now we see people saying that we should be using “designated x at birth” as part of the push to get trans* people out of the “assigned” terminology, but seriously, there are people out there (I don’t know if they’re intersex, or dyadic white knights/opportunistic transphobes) who attack the “dxab” terminology for the same chimerical reasoning. 

The goalpost moving is still happening, and there is no end point except when trans* people are deemed to sufficiently out of sight. It’s not a slippery slope argument; we’re standing on solid ground and the reference point is being moved around us.

curiousgeorgiana:

cocothinkshefancy:

I do not understand why people get married on plantations - or romanticize them. Yes, they are pretty. I admit it! Some are pretty. Sure, I buy it with a quarter.

But that prettiness sure came at quite a cost. Like, I make it my duty as a southerner to be super vocal about how wack-a-doo that shit is. Would you get married at Oswiecim (Auschwitz yall) ? Or like set up on the trail of tears?

There are a bajillion other southern places with spanish moss, romanticism, and like all the other whoo-de-ha that comes with our pretty little turf that isn’t directly rooted in the enslavement of the majority of folks who reside in the south.

Yep.

girljanitor:

alexandraerin:

johnisdollywood:

ann-tagonist:

Young people, please don’t fall for gender. Your demipanromantic transfagbulldyke identity is a chain hanging around your neck. 

Gender presentation is a fancy word for fashion. It’s how the average person on the street perceives you. In our Western culture, there are only two genders so you will instantly be categorized by everyone who meets you as either a woman/girl or a man/boy and certain expectations will be placed upon you dependent on which category you fall under. 

Many, many, many people are unhappy with the gender label they were assigned. These people might call themselves transgender, transsexual, genderqueer, genderfluid, genderfucking, androgynous, neutrois, polygender, agender, gender variant, or queer. They might also call themselves radical feminists.

None of us like gender roles. The difference is in the approach. Radical feminists consider gender to be toxic and damaging. Gender forces young people people to waste time doing soul-searching identity quests to discover which gender label applies to them. It forces labels on to small children who are still young enough to think they will be Batman next week. It forces young people on to puberty suppressing drugs which will beholden them to the pharmaceutical company for life; drugs that will sterilise them. Gender forces women to cut off their breasts and men to invert their penises. Gender kills people. We don’t need gender because it is a tool of the patriarchy used to subjugate females into the weaker feminine role and elevate males to a dominant and masculine role. Gender is inherently damaging. We shouldn’t reinforce it by playing with it. Gender should be played out.

Instead of fucking with gender, we need to fuck gender off. Be yourself. You can’t change the sex you were born and trying to do it chemically and surgery is really fucking dangerous! Don’t be a gender, just be a decent person who happens to be either male or female. Be a conscientious objector.

Also, uh: “It forces young people on to puberty suppressing drugs which will beholden them to the pharmaceutical company for life; drugs that will sterilise them.”

Puberty-suppressing drugs are only taken for a short period of time, so that young people have time to decide whether they want to go on with transition or not. If they decide not to, they go off the drugs and puberty continues its own merry little way.

You’re acting as though trans* people are committing some vast conspiracy to turn everyone into a textbook transsexual. The truth is that precious few people actually go on to physical transition. There are more of us than there were in the past, but that’s due to more awareness. Not only that, but if you actually asked a trans* person, “hey should I go through with gender confirmation?” the answer you would get would not be “YES BY ALL MEANS LET’S GET THOSE BREASTS RIGHT OFFA YOU,” it would be “well if you think that’s what’s right for you.” 

We just think that everyone has the right to self-identify as they please, and we want them to have the options to make the best choices for themselves. 

Unlike you.

But this one time some trans*-identified teenager told a butch lesbian that she was probably actually a trans* man in denial and this proves that we’re all thinking that everybody should be transsexuals, especially if it gets rid of cis gay people.

“Gender forces young people people to waste time doing soul-searching identity quests to discover which gender label applies to them…Gender is inherently damaging. We shouldn’t reinforce it by playing with it.”

You know what? I’m a two-spirited person, and implying that soul-searching is somehow a fucking BAD THING sounds  the same as the fucking GOP saying that critical thinking skills should NOT be taught in schools.

Although my cultural history was shattered by colonization, there are still fragments that can be healed into a whole identity, and that includes third and fourth gender people. To be fair, “two-spirit” tends toward being a pan-Indian identity, and there are actually quite a few MORE than four genders to choose from! And you know what? They require “soul-searching identity quests”, because that shit is important, and valuable, and is NOT a waste of time.

To be fair, my gender identity is specifically also a racial and cultural identity, and therefore isn’t open to all people, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t more genders worldwide:

On nearly every continent, and for all of recorded history, thriving cultures have recognized, revered, and integrated more than two genders. Terms such as transgender and gay are strictly new constructs that assume three things: that there are only two sexes (male/female), as many as two sexualities (gay/straight), and only two genders (man/woman).

Yet hundreds of distinct societies around the globe have their own long-established traditions for third, fourth, fifth, or more genders. Fred Martinez, for example, was not a boy who wanted to be a girl, but both a boy and a girl — an identity his Navajo culture recognized and revered as nádleehí. Most Western societies have no direct correlation for this Native “two-spirit” tradition, nor for the many other communities without strict either/or conceptions of sex, sexuality, and gender. Worldwide, the sheer variety of gender expression is almost limitless. Take a tour and learn how other cultures see gender diversity.

I realize that you’re talking about “western culture” specifically, but third genders DO have a history, even in Europe.

Saying that being young and searching for your identity, which includes gender, sexuality, and possibilities for adulthood are a “waste of time” is fucking ridiculous. It’s erasing, dismissive and completely wrongheaded. For fucks sakes.

youngbadmanbrown:

Arawak men and women, naked, tawny, and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island’s beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore, carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of this in his log:

They … brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They willingly traded everything they owned… . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… . They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

These Arawaks of the Bahama Islands were much like Indians on the mainland, who were remarkable (European observers were to say again and again) for their hospitality, their belief in sharing. These traits did not stand out in the Europe of the Renaissance, dominated as it was by the religion of popes, the government of kings, the frenzy for money that marked Western civilization and its first messenger to the Americas, Christopher Columbus.

It was early October 1492, and thirty-three days since he and his crew had left the Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Now they saw branches and sticks floating in the water. They saw flocks of birds.

So, approaching land, they were met by the Arawak Indians, who swam out to greet them. The Arawaks lived in village communes, had a developed agriculture of corn, yams, cassava. They could spin and weave, but they had no horses or work animals. They had no iron, but they wore tiny gold ornaments in their ears.

This was to have enormous consequences: it led Columbus to take some of them aboard ship as prisoners because he insisted that they guide him to the source of the gold. He then sailed to what is now Cuba, then to Hispaniola (the island which today consists of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). There, bits of visible gold in the rivers, and a gold mask presented to Columbus by a local Indian chief, led to wild visions of gold fields.

On Hispaniola, out of timbers from the Santa Maria, which had run aground, Columbus built a fort, the first European military base in the Western Hemisphere. He called it Navidad (Christmas) and left thirty-nine crewmembers there, with instructions to find and store the gold. He took more Indian prisoners and put them aboard his two remaining ships. At one part of the island he got into a fight with Indians who refused to trade as many bows and arrows as he and his men wanted. Two were run through with swords and bled to death. Then the Nina and the Pinta set sail for the Azores and Spain. When the weather turned cold, the Indian prisoners began to die.

In the year 1495, they went on a great slave raid, rounded up fifteen hundred Arawak men, women, and children, put them in pens guarded by Spaniards and dogs, then picked the five hundred best specimens to load onto ships. Of those five hundred, two hundred died en route. The rest arrived alive in Spain and were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town, who reported that, although the slaves were “naked as the day they were born,” they showed “no more embarrassment than animals.” Columbus later wrote: “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”

But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.

The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.

Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.

When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.

Source

(Source: youngbadmangone)

bankuei:

karnythia:

morningchorus:

karnythia:

alexandraerin:

papa-austria:

ladyatheist:

Here’s a good place to start.

Uh, I’m pretty sure it was more about the states’ rights to keep slavery legal, and about how the Southern states viewed the Federal Government as infringing upon their sovereignty. 

Abolitionists accounted for only 5% of the North’s population at the onset of the war, and they were highly ridiculed and unpopular. 

Abraham Lincoln’s official stance for going to war with the South was to preserve the Union, as slavery was permitted according to the US Constitution. This was in part a political move, so that he could retain the loyalty of the border states, which was sorely needed. Also, most Northerners shared a similar view on slavery as being legal, and would not fight against slavery, while they WOULD fight to preserve their nation. Of course, Lincoln’s views concerning slavery did change over the course of five years of warfare, but he had no intention of freeing the slaves in the beginning, and he maintained the popular opinion of the time that African Americans were not equal to their Caucasian counterparts. It’s simply the way society thought at the time.

Discontent in the South, however, stemmed further than slavery. It really started in the 1830s when Congress was passing so many high tariffs on cotton and other exports that the agricultural economy of the South could not handle it. Cotton prices plummeted and we entered into an economic depression. While this was in part due to the fact that states such as South Carolina were heavily burdened with an abundance of cotton, they chose to blame the high tariffs Congress was passing. It was John C. Calhoun who supported the idea of ‘nullification’, that is, a state could decide if a federal law was unconstitutional or not, and choose to enforce it or not. The federal government must introduce an amendment, and if the state in question rejects that, they are able to secede from the Union.

SO When the federal government passed another high tariff in 1832, South Carolina was outraged, and threatened secession. 

So. I disagree. The Civil War was about the US Consitution, States’ Rights, and the preservation of the Union versus the Southern Economy and Way of Life.

I like how you think you’re disagreeing.

If you had just spoken of the southern way of life and the basis of the southern economy and “state’s rights” in general while saying it wasn’t about slavery it would just be one of those ironic things where you might legitimately not see how following those lines to the end of the rainbow leads back to slavery, as so many people do.

But you’re specifically talking about “state’s rights to keep slavery legal” right up at the top. How do you start a rant specifically saying that they wanted the right to keep slavery legal and end it by saying it wasn’t about slavery?

Also, let’s talk about that states’ rights thing. If the point of “states’ rights to slavery” was “states’ rights” and not “slavery”, we should expect the Confederate Constitution to leave all questions relating to slavery entirely up to the states, shouldn’t we? And yet the most significant differences between the U.S. Constitution (which, as you say, provided for slavery) and the C.S. one is that the Confederates left nothing to choice or chance when it came to slavery.

Where are states’ rights in that? I suppose it could be argued that they were practicing their right of free association and that a Confederate state that didn’t want to practice slavery could secede and/or form a new union with another body of like-minded states. We could argue forever about how likely it is that the Confederacy, if faced with such a crisis, would have endured the loss of part of its body with more grace than the Union did. I personally find it unlikely to be so, especially if the reason for the secession touches on their “way of life”, but of course this cannot be positively proven either way. The supposed principles behind the Confederacy say that they should allow states to exit the compact at will, but those same principles should have allowed new states to chart their own course regarding slavery, so we can’t rely on the principles having been followed.

Seriously, they wrote it into the Confederate Constitution

Article IV Section 3(3)

The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several states; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form states to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government: and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories, shall have the right to take to such territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the states or territories of the Confederate states.

And in the 1860 Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.

For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.

Is it that hard to use source documents for these people?

Not only that, but people conveniently forget that before the civil war, slaveholding states opposed states rights. They had power in the legislature, and they tried to use all the federal power they could, especially to enforce the fugitive slave act on non-slaveholding states. Once they lost federal power then the slaveholding states started to go for states rights, and went so far as to pass state laws concerning northern states to get their slaves back. Seriously people, learn your history. States rights has always been used as means to get what they want by the political party that is out of power.

Welp…

Let’s also NOT FORGET that the Fugitive Slave Act had the slave states sending people into non-slave states to KIDNAP free Black citizens under the pretext that they were slaves.

So, even IF you’re going to accept this idea that this ideal of states’ rights trumping human rights (and holy fuck, really? That’s an argument you want to make? Um…), EVEN THEN it means that the right to kidnap and enslave Black people, regardless of citizenship and rights - that basically, SLAVERY trumps all state rights, including the STATES WHO DO NOT ENGAGE IN SLAVERY.

But hey, if you ever want to hide something from a racist, put it in a book.

(Source: brashblacknonbeliever)