Patriarchy's distorted understanding of the gender binary, where there are only "men" and "women / other" and any consistent femininity or gender nonconformity gets AMAB people put in the second category, has some weird social side-effects. Like, I was a closeted trans girl up until college but I didn't try to hide it that much. I cultivated androgyny and femininity to cope (poorly) with dysphoria, and while I wasn't Carrie White levels of uncool or unpopular, I definitely existed on the social margins.

A lot of anti-trans arguments boil down to saying, "That's impossible! Biology!"

When clearly, it happens all the time, on a regular basis, and causes a great deal of distress if trans people aren't allowed to express ourselves. 🤷‍♀️

It doesn't matter what YOU think is possible. Trans healthcare exists for the same reason antidepressants and other treatments exist: because a need exists and it enables people to lead happy, healthy, functional lives.

Tying yourself up in epistemological knots about whether someone is "really" depressed is just as futile.

My earliest, most fundamental issue with religion / mythology was the insistence of so many on portraying women as weak, stupid, "unclean" due to menstruation, and easily misled by whimsy or "rapacious" sexual appetites, all trying to justify their subjugation by men. The insistence of several religions that women couldn't be priests because they could neither receive nor understand the (apparently sexist) divine wisdom was extremely dehumanizing, to say the least.

I suppose I should note that yes, men are also harmed by these patriarchal conceptions of sex and gender.

Trust me, trans women are very aware of the violence and misery inherent in society's attempts to enforce conformity in men and AMAB people.

But we can't fix it for you. The simple truth is cis het boys and men are the greatest threat to girls and women, cis and trans, and I would note that the violence directed against us as trans women, starting at an early age, is heavily gendered even when we are in the closet.

AMAB people identifying as girls / women has often been seen as "perverse," the overt argument usually being "defying god / nature," but the underlying impulse is the more basic belief, stated repeatedly, that femininity / femaleness itself is perverse, unclean, and unwholesome. Patriarchy seeks to control women for sexual and reproductive ends but also feels compelled to debase them to elevate its conception of masculinity, mixed with a ridiculous, Lovecraft-esque horror of menstruation and a dehumanizing obsession / objectification of female bodies.

Thread.

https://twitter.com/tzimmer_history/status/1600131056199311361

The media is bad enough, but I am incensed at Democrats who insist on giving Republicans cover by pretending they don't mean what they say and that there's some bipartisan, centrist consensus to be had with people who want to slit our throats.

It's such white nonsense.

Anti-trans pundits and their reactionary political allies are attacking one of the most vulnerable groups in society and smugly patting themselves on the back for "speaking truth to power." You know what "power" trans people have?

None.

We're mostly poor, unemployed or underemployed, widely discriminated against for jobs, healthcare, and housing, frequently victims of violence, and shunned even by many of our ostensible liberal and queer allies.

It's entirely deliberate that at a time of ascendant fascism, the media has been taken over by cis het white male punditry, propagandists eager for fame, influence, and book sales, who see their job as telling us what to think instead of what the facts are. The right-wing is fueled by hate, it needs scapegoats, and it feeds on controversy, and from the prestigious NYT, WaPo, and Atlantic down to the sewers of InfoWars and Nick Fuentes, there is a concerted, collective, unified effort to will their ideology into reality.

Structural economic factors are important for why our country is spinning out of control, but it's not the "white working class" feeling left behind so much as it's too fucking expensive to live and no one cares because the economy is grrrrrrrreat! For the rich and corporations. And aside from the extended child tax credit, which was incredibly effective at reducing poverty, Democratic attention has been focused either on swing state minutiae or on an abstract, macro scale of decades long infrastructure investments.

Not what's happening RIGHT NOW.

The far right despises the media, which is owned by the slightly less far right, mainly because it has not been as aggressive as they want in pushing lies and fascist propaganda, and then mainly because right-wing views are not popular and don't make money. The far right, which is weirdly, terminally online for the most part, seems determined to circumvent the media via social media, only it turns out fascist social media spaces aren't popular either.

I dreamed I was going to be tortured and executed as a rebel by this authoritarian magitech kingdom but their pain stick didn't work on me for some reason. (It actually felt nice, like a massager.) I used the opportunity to escape, fleeing through the city and evading their giant mechanical golem sentries, and collapsed for the night in an abandoned house.

Cis people seem generally oblivious to transphobic dog whistles and are inundated with deceptive, manipulative articles in prestige media designed to take advantage of that and turn them against us. I don't trust the media or journalism cliques in general as we've seen them colluding behind the scenes to blacklist trans journalists and push moral panic, and I don't trust cis people to make good moderation decisions or judgment calls over these issues at all.

I just treated it like an MMO server. "Gates of Madness? Sounds good to me!"

https://twitter.com/owillis/status/1593608286460420101

The biggest problem is server choice is potentially way more important than Mastodon lets on but there is no real source of information about which one to choose.

Like I've said before, the NYT, WaPo, Atlantic, WSJ, etc. make a lot more sense when you realize they're not talking to us or trying to inform anyone but they're usually communicating intent and what is acceptable to the other affluent white people who follow them. Individual writers may not think that way but it's the product of editorial decisions and them collectively policing their tone and rhetoric.

Let's be honest that what they're pining for is a return to exclusive white male rule where "contentious issues" like other people's rights are swept under the rug.

Which is why "polarization" is almost exclusively a rhetorical cudgel used against Democrats and the left.

https://twitter.com/tzimmer_history/status/1587802625377984512

It annoys me how much very smart people talk around this underlying point.

The essential element of most white male punditry is the desire to return to an era when nobody else mattered and where pleasing unanimity could be obtained by cooperatively keeping everyone else down.

Thread but especially this.

People trying to discount the use of the word fascism to describe modern political movements always treat these sorts of incidentals as definitive.

https://twitter.com/perdricof/status/1587927418303811585

There's no way to describe modern fascism without discussing how it is shaped by the Internet, by social media, forum culture, gamergate, etc.

That doesn't mean fascism requires the Internet.

"The Nazis weren't really fascist because they didn't use 4chan." Sounds stupid, huh?

White people always claim they're "under attack" despite living in an overtly white supremacist country where they have all the power. The white conservative Christians are especially loud about it.

It's part of how they maintain white supremacy. It's also the fundamental impulse toward fascism in this country because white people who insist they are under siege and on the ropes despite all evidence to the contrary will, of course, embrace fascist politics and undemocratic means to "restore order."

Which would never work? He'd own a dead platform.

I think he has no idea what he's doing. No master plan. He bought a shiny bauble and now he doesn't know how to pay for it. Odds are he sells out to somebody like the Saudis to get out from under it.

https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1587560622576660481

Musk is very obviously trying to look cool in front of his followers while simultaneously trying to keep advertisers from fleeing and begging power users to pay for something most of them don't need.

Republicans don't actually care about abortion or anything else they pretend to be outraged about.

They only care about power.

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1587495305175523332

Republicans use moral panics to bludgeon weak-willed people into conceding to their point of view. Because that means conceding power.

Especially when they know neither will remain in office.

https://twitter.com/owillis/status/1587449620929691654

The thing is, Democrats and Republicans both believe legitimacy derives from white support, and since the GOP wins a majority of white voters, Democrats do not feel entitled to criticize them except in the mildest possible terms. So it must be left to other Republicans.

Democrats cater to an affluent white suburban to urban minority while offering shelter, conditionally, to Black and marginalized voters.

The GOP caters to the ultra-wealthy and an unhinged minority of white middle class bigots and theocrats dressed up in working class drag. The first group sees itself as a cultural elite, is overly represented in prestige media, and is concerned with "propriety," manifested as a centrist disdain for partisanship and social / economic issues threatening to their status as the white ruling class.