Poll Idea Since I'm Curious: Why Don't You Reblog The Art That You Like?

Poll idea since I'm curious: Why don't you reblog the art that you like?

-I don't like the art that much

-I don't want to

-I forget

-I don't reblog anything

-I always reblog art I like

-I don't like or reblog art

-Nuanced answer (tags)

Thanks~!

allegations

[ID: Three panel comic with crudely drawn stick figures for people.

Panel 1: A grayscale person holding some paper is talking to a dark red person.

Grayscale: "You should know, your green friend is actually a really terrible person."

Dark Red: "...I assume you've got proof of this assertion?"

Grayscale: "Oh I do, have a look at this"

Panel 2: Dark Red is holding the paper and looking at it.

Dark Red: "Is this... fandom drama?"

Grayscale: "Read on, it gets so much worse"

Dark Red: "It gets worse but you started with their opinions on a cartoon?"

Grayscale: "Keep going! The really bad stuff starts at page 127!"

Dark Red: "Why the fuck would you put it after the cartoon opinions"

Panel 3: Dark Red rips apart the paper as the grayscale person complains

Dark Red: "Right. Your source on the bad stuff is a cyberstalking group. What a waste of time."

Grayscale: "But if the accusations are true they're really bad!"

Dark Red: "If."

End ID.]

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compromise

[ID: Four panel comic with crudely drawn stick people.

Panel 1: A person wearing an indigo hat and a person with a green body, pink jacket and half red, half blue pointy anime glasses are talking.

Anime Glasses: "See, what you have to learn eventually, which I'm teaching you now, is you can't rely on external validation.

People are going to ask you to compromise your existence with their worldviews, and you're going to tell them no.

That'll be coming both from grayscales and other chromatics, by the way.

Indigo: Huh.

Panel 2: A violet person with a rectangular build enters from the side.

Violet: "Hang on, weren't you pink before?"

Anime Glasses: "Visually, sure."

Violet: "And now you're green?"

Anime Glasses: "Yeah. Got bored. Changed it up."

Violet: "You can't just do that."

Anime Glasses: "Nah. You can't. Skill issue."

Panel 3: A grayscale person enters to back up Violet.

Grayscale: "See, this is what we've been saying all along. Where is the limit? When will the madness end??"

Violet: "Wait don't back me up on this-"

Grayscale, interupting: "You'll be pressuring them into turning themselves blue! You're making this serious decision seem trivial, but it's not! Who's going to tell them to wait and think things through?"

Anime glasses, quietly towards indigo: "Here's your chance. Tell them."

Panel 4: Zoom in on Indigo, with anime glasses in the background tilting their glasses up so the light glares off them.

Indigo: "Indigo. Not fucking blue.

Everyone's been telling me to wait with this shit for twenty fucking years.

How about mind your own business and don't interrupt the first person who's actually fucking helping me."

End ID.]

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'Trans' Before 'Girl': The Third-Gendering of Trans Women

I have found myself considering often recently the stark difference in comfort I feel when hanging out with a group of trans women as opposed to any other mix of people.  The way I unfold and stretch into a warm familiarity in the presence of my sisters in ways I didn’t even know were possible; the years I spent hunched in on myself, slouched and cramped into something smaller than I am. I’ve wondered about why this is, why I feel this pressure even amongst lifelong friends who have never once been anything but supportive of me and my identity. Friends who stand up for me to others and go out of their way to be affirming. Even in a room full of gender-freaks and capital-Q Queers, I am still shrink-wrapped in tight discomfort, like fitting into clothes that aren’t too big or too small, but cut in just the right way that you know they look wrong on you. I have realized it is because in all of these spaces, the queerness of my identity is more important than my identity itself. I am never just a woman, I am always a transgender woman. I am always ‘trans’ before I am ‘girl’. 

I think this phenomenon is clearly related to the fetishization of trans women, but not because it is fetishizing in itself. I don’t hang out with the kind of people who would read the Trans Girl Pick-Up Guide, and yet I still encounter this feeling of separation, of reduction and simplification and otherness, on a near-daily basis. I think this and the fetishization of trans women have the same root cause, which is the third-gendering of trans identities. The reduction of trans women to genitalia is certainly one part of this, but there are non-sexual aspects as well that are based in the way we define transgenderism itself. As long as transgenderism is marked as the switch from one gender to another, often but not always from the “assigned” gender to the “chosen” gender, it implicitly distances those people from the very gender identities they are trying to claim. My womanhood is always predicated on the context of my previous “manhood”. My transition, be it social or physical, is always the foundation upon which my womanhood is built; I am always ‘trans’ before I am ‘girl’. In this why I am consistently third-gendered by those around me, made to exist outside of the binary (this is not to say that I believe or support the gender binary; I think we should do away with it entirely. The problem lies from the binary being enforced and stapled over, of creating categories that are made other because of their movement). 

There are, of course, spaces and times where I do claim and celebrate this foundation, this otherness. I am proud of my journey into self-realization, and my queerness is an important aspect of my personality that I don’t try to play down or hide. My experiences, my beliefs, my actions and my desires, all are influenced by this part of my identity in ways I may not even fully realize. I am trans, and I am proud of that. But when I claim myself as a trans woman, those two words are given equal weight; they share the podium. I am trans. I am woman. I am me. In the presence of others, though, I can feel the latter being pushed to the back, like a celebrity being pushed behind their representative. A child being pushed behind their parent. My womanhood is to be seen, but my transness is to be heard. I think that the emphasis on queer identity can sometimes be a tool of ostracization from the self, rather than simply ostracization from others. Especially in the current social climate of precise identification and ‘queer solidarity’, people become focused on the queer identity, and not enough on the identity itself. It is only when I am surrounded by other trans women that I feel like I exist without caveat or precursor; when I am truly, uncompromisingly ‘girl’. I know more trans women than I can count, and yet I can count on one hand the number of times I have heard any of them refer to themselves simply as ‘a woman’ around others. Only when we are alone can it become implicit, an understanding rather than a explanation, and we can simply exist in our womanhood together. When we can just be a couple of girls, hanging out. 

Hopefully you’ve noticed that throughout this I have separated the word trans from the word woman. This is on purpose: I think that the increasing commonality of “transwoman” or “transfem” as a single word is a large part of this issue, because it intrinsically links our identity to a modified womanhood, a modified femininity. We can never take off the context of our separation; of our previous identity. And of course there are trans women who do identify with that label, who want to claim that context and wear it proud, always. I fully support any transfem who does so, as her self-realization is the most important thing. This, just like everything else, is just my observations from the lens of my own experience.

I don’t know that I have a call to action here besides asking people to be cognizant of what they prioritize when talking with trans women. Separate the words. Remember that her identity is not just her transition. Remember that she is a girl, too.

1) beekeeping is still exploitation of animals, and vegans are people against animal exploitation. It is humans taking what animals make and using that for our own consumption and to make a profit. It is people deciding that they are free to take what animals worked to make. Bees living under a beekeeper are still livestock, which leads to

2) Ok, the first point is more of a politics/morality high matter, so let's talk more welfarism-adjacent stuff

- if bees consent... why do you need a protective suit and a smoke machine. It seems that bees do, in fact, not like other creatures taking their honey. They even have a reputation for this. They have stingers and even die while using them... to sting whatever creatures are trying to mess with their hive;

- the fact that they stay does not mean that they understand that their honey will be taken. They are bees, they don't sign contracts and they cannot foresee that staying in this cosy place will lead to a human eventually taking their honey;

- also who says people don't take as much honey as they want... we live in a capitalist society with everything being pushed to make a profit;

- it will be replaced with a sugary syrup/substance... oh hey, if, apparently, honey can be replaced by that for bees, maybe we should replace honey with that for humans 😯 oh, is it not the same? why is it acceptable to give it to bees then;

- regarding bees being able to leave. Yeah, cutting the queen's wings so it can't lead the hive off is a practice. Also you'll find guides online telling you how to prevent swarming. You know, when a part of a hive wants to leave, it's the bees' way of reproduction. And guides on how to catch wild bees. People do, in fact, prevent them from leaving;

- bees make honey to survive the winter. Speaking of which, btw, discarding hives for winter and just buying new bees for the new season might be cheaper than sustaining the bees the whole time, so some people do that too.

Honestly... honey is one of the easiest things to abandon as a vegan. There are plenty of syrups you can use. You can even make your own stuff from sugar and dandelions! I should try making that in August when they bloom again

isn't honey always vegan? because bees basically consent to being beekept, make more honey than they need, and can leave if they want to? /gen

according to my little knowledge on bees, I do believe that bees are able to produce more honey than they need. however, bees are not always kept kindly. the conditions are often not in the best interest of the bees themselves. some vegans will eat honey from beekeepers that they know do their due diligence to protect bees, and aren't focused on extracting honey. but many vegans just wanna be distanced from consuming animals & their by-products, as much as they're practically able to, so that they can detach from engaging in exploitative dynamics between humans and other animals.

Accessibility takes too goddamn fucking long.

My brother was paralyzed in October 2023. We got him home from the hospital (in Texas, when we live in Iowa) in a clunky old hospital chair. He hated it. He was scared and angry and in pain and his life had just changed forever and he couldn’t do anything for himself in that wheelchair. His first goal (aside from learning how to transfer) was to get a wheelchair. My family was lucky enough to afford one so we thought it would be easy enough. Nope.

We couldn’t buy him a wheelchair. He needed a prescription. For a wheelchair. A doctor had to examine him and declare him in need of a wheelchair. It wasn’t good enough that he had scans and tests showing tumors cutting off his spinal cord. He needed his primary care doctor to examine him during a physical and write a prescription. He was making 2-4 transfers a day, tops. He had no energy to get to a doctor. Home health was in and out every day. He had no time to get to a doctor. He didn’t get a prescription for almost a month. Then it had to go through insurance.

We asked if we could skip insurance and just buy a wheelchair for him. Nope. They wouldn’t sell us one, not even at full sticker price. It needed to be approved by Medicare. We ordered a wheelchair, a nice one, a good shade of green, sporty, small. It would let him move around the house. He would be able to cook, to reach drawers and get stuff from the fridge and brush his teeth and put his contacts in at a sink. We were told it would take awhile, maybe two months. Silently we all hoped he would be around to see two more months.

He went on hospice care on a Saturday in March. On Monday, I was calling his friends to come see him before he died. I got a call on his phone. It was the wheelchair company. They were about to order his wheelchair, she said, but there was an issue with insurance— had he stopped being covered by Medicare? Well, yes. When he started hospice care, he got kicked off Medicare. The very nice woman I talked to told me to call her if he resumed Medicare coverage so she could order his wheelchair. He died less than 12 hours later.

We ordered that chair for him in early December. Medicare didn’t approve the order until March. He was dead before they got around to it. He wanted that fucking wheelchair so badly. The only reason he had any semblance of independence and any quality of life for the last five months of his life was because the wheelchair company lent him an old beater chair, a very used model of the chair he ordered. If I could go back and change one thing about his end-of-life, I would get him his dream wheelchair. He told me again and again he couldn’t wait to get it, so that he could feel like a person again. He made the best of what he had with that old beater chair, but it still makes me mad to this day. He was paralyzed. He needed a chair that afforded him dignity. We had the money for it. And yet, we were left waiting for five months, for a chair that wouldn’t even get ordered until the day he died.