I'm not going to lie, watching cis people near universally accept terms like "biological sex", "biological female", etc without hesitation or questioning in less than a year has me terrified. Like... Are y'all seriously unaware that those terms are dogwhistles?
Watching TERF dogwhistles catch on in common parlance within a year, while every trans person I know is begging for cis people to give a fuck about the rising rhetoric and violence against us, is really a lot.
Even self professed "allies" are using these terms.
If TERF dogwhistles (and by extension, TERF logic) is so much easier for cis people to understand than the actual real life pain and suffering of trans people, I don't know what to do.
"Biological sex", "biological male", etc are terms that only have value to you if you believe "sex" or "male" are insufficient or incomplete descriptors. These terms only have value if you think sex assigned at birth is more important than current sex. That's TERF logic.
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In year three of the pandemic, I see many people mourning not only death around us, but a loss of public trust in institutions, spread of misinformation, and governmental instability. For today, I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about cholera. 🧵
Cholera, as many of you likely know, is a bacterial illness spread by fecal-oral routes due to contaminated food or drinking water. It almost universally exists where sanitation infrastructure is low or nonexistent.
Cholera is particularly interesting because it is a disease that emerged very suddenly. Cholera (of the highly infectious variety) didn't evolve until the 1800s. Specifically, it broke out in 1817, two years after the Tambora volcanic eruption that caused acute climactic change.
One of my favorite facts about plant evolution is that most plants we use as spices evolved their particular tastes specifically as a *deterrent* to predation. And then, like usual, humans ruined everything.
Like, capsaicin (the chemical in spicy peppers that makes them spicy) can't be tasted by birds, only mammals. Spicy peppers evolved this specifically to discourage predation by mammals (who can't distribute seeds very far) and to instead selectively encourage predation by birds.
Garlic, onions, and other pungent roots evolved their tastes specifically to taste bad to animals so that the plants can keep their stores of nutrition safe underground through the winter.
One thing that transphobes have in common is that they are certain that they can define another's experience for them, and they're so insistent on this that a refusal to define someone else is taken as a *failure* to define them.
For instance, on the recent Dr. Phil segment of infamy, a nonbinary person was asked to define a woman, to which they replied that they couldn't define the experience of womanhood for everyone, as it is unique. This was treated as a *failure* to define what a woman is by TERFs.
And this reveals a lot about the underlying tenets of their philosophy. It has no room for individual experience or self-determination. Rather, it enforces that all identifiers must be impressed on someone by outside forces, rather than defined by the individual.
It's #TransAwarenessWeek so here's a few concepts I want cis people to really wrestle with to be better allies. 🏳️⚧️🧵
Firstly, trans people have always been here. We aren't a new phenomena or a "fad", we're just coming under greater scrutiny right now.
Trans people are everywhere. We are estimated to be between 2-5% of the total population. This means you almost definitely know a trans person, whether they're out to you or not.
Today, let's talk about puberty blockers. What they do, what they don't do, what risks they pose, what risks they alleviate, and more. 🧵
TW for anatomical and medical discussion.
To understand puberty blockers, we first must understand what puberty is.
Puberty is the uptick in levels of various hormones in the body that allows for the development of secondary sex characteristics, usually occurring between the ages of 9-15.
"Puberty blockers" themselves are slightly misleadingly named. They don't block all aspects of puberty, just those related to estrogen and testosterone.
Transmasculine people, including trans men, talking about specific oppression directed towards them, is not denying the existence or severity of transmisogyny.
There is a common misconception that transmasculine and transfeminine liberation are contradictory objectives rather than deeply intertwined ones. I think this comes from a deeply linear view of transition and seeing transmasculine and transfeminine people as "opposites".
Transmasculine and transfeminine people's liberation is inseparable and intertwined. We can find much more allyship and solidarity with each other than we can with the majority of cis onlookers. Our survival depends on it.