What’s in a TERF?

CN suicide, transmisogyny, violence

To the endless bafflement of people whose sense of ethical behavior does not include driving strangers to self-harm, the transgender community faces intense hostility. What is interesting in our case is that people with extraordinarily different overall ideologies come to equally intense hatred of transgender people in general and trans women in particular, and this makes some words we are tempted to use to encompass all of our detractors a poor fit. This brings is to that famously deadly group, the TERFs.

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What’s in a TERF?
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What Narcissists Taught Me about Talking to Allistic People

In case you’ve been in a beautiful fantasy world for the past few years, I have a sad truth to report: the world is, just, full of allistic people. Not only that, but despite their comically overstated deficiencies at staying organized, attaining intense mastery of niche topics, and being at all bearable to be around, they control almost everything. Learning how to deal with their bizarre needs is a necessary life skill for the rest of us, and I came to learn what I have about how they operate from a still more noisome source: narcissistic, emotionally abusive parents.

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What Narcissists Taught Me about Talking to Allistic People

Violence and Trans Women of Colour: The Intersections – Keynote Address

I was asked to provide facilitation and a keynote address of sorts for “Violence and Trans Women of Colour: The Intersections,” an event hosted by Carleton University’s Carleton Equity Services, Graduate Students’ Association, Carleton University, and CUSA Womyn’s Centre as part of the university’s Sexual Assault Awareness Week. While my remarks during the event did not exactly match what I prepared, the original material is now here for others’ perusal.

Announcement for Sexual Assault Awareness Week

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Violence and Trans Women of Colour: The Intersections – Keynote Address

My Place in the Palms

Images of people in my culture don’t look like me.

There’s a trivial sense in which that’s not true. My dark, angled eyes, curly hair, curvaceous figure, and diminutive stature all betray my origins. Our beauty queens and pop stars in particular look like me, conspicuously lighter in hue than even our own relatives. As distinctive as I always am in family photos, someone else who looked like me would not have seemed out of place.

But the image of us isn’t a scientist. She isn’t an atheist or a socialist. She isn’t dating outside her race. She isn’t deliberately far away from her parents. She isn’t autistic. She isn’t transgender. She isn’t gay.

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My Place in the Palms

Being Trans and Autistic Is Weird and Common

Almost every trans woman I know is either autistic or makes me wonder if they are. My AutDar is well-tuned enough that I trust it over most other criteria available to me, and it pings almost all of them. Some evidence suggests that gender dysphoria is much more common among autistic people than in the general population, so this is likely not merely anecdote. Those studies need a lot of cleanup to actually mean something (not least to get asshole charlatan Simon Baron-Cohen’s name off of them). Either way, whether we’re more abundant than expected or not, this combination makes our experiences rather…unusual.

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Being Trans and Autistic Is Weird and Common

Angling For Myself: A Jane and Jessie Story

Jane lounged in her camping chair, nearly dozing. Her grip on her fishing rod was loose, and she might have lost it already if Froslass hadn’t been keeping an eye on it. She wasn’t losing any fish, at least, on this slowest of fishing days.

She had earned this relaxation. Jane had come a long way, and the crowd of Pokémon surrounding her had borne witness to her progress. Not so long ago, the thought of napping outdoors in shorts, sandals, and a tank top, legs and arms taking in the gentle sun, a thin seam of midriff peeking out between the pieces, would have been terrifying. She feared for her life, then, with Team Rocket still livid over her defection. Before that, she feared herself, and what becoming herself would mean. But now, with Arcanine (“Growly” to her) and Cacturne napping vigilantly behind her, Sylveon curled up at her feet, Froslass and Chimecho on her lap, and Joltik enjoying the view from atop her head, she never felt so free.

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Angling For Myself: A Jane and Jessie Story

A Curated Selection of Abattoir Drippings: My Spam Folder, Screencapped and Mocked

CN pretty much every kind of bigoted abuse but mostly racist, instructions to suicide, MRAs/libertarians/edgelords being themselves.

As expected, answering 27 Questions has induced a steady influx of anti-humanist nonsense into my comments queue.  I’m better prepared than most to receive this onslaught, because I’ve watched this happen to people far more important and interesting than me for a long time, I’ve read what the various subsets of atheist dirtbag are about, and I feel no need to let them get close enough to get under my skin. They have no surprises for me, and nothing to say that far more articulate bigots haven’t said before. They can whine endlessly about how, in this heat, taking away their freeze-peach is a super mean thing to do, the kind of thing only a crate of hippos would dare make standard policy, and I can look at the other things in my spam folder and derive amusement from the idea that they think I’ll ever take them seriously.

Y’all are dangerous, not interesting. Understanding yourselves is a big step toward becoming better people, and I’m glad I could help.

With that in mind, this comment stuck out at me for how impressively it missed all the points.

My face at your shenanigans.
My face at your shenanigans.

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A Curated Selection of Abattoir Drippings: My Spam Folder, Screencapped and Mocked

Rose Quartz Creeps Me Out

It’s not easy for me to feel good about maternal figures in media. (Gee, I wonder why.) This is something I’m aware of and keep in mind when one of them starts to rub me the wrong way, or otherwise shows their flaws. I can acknowledge Dr. Maheswaran’s harshness and overly protective tendencies, I can see and cathartically process Sadie’s mother’s overweening enthusiasm and difficulty seeing the daughter in front of her, but Rose Quartz creeps me out.

Rose Quartz, who resembles a thickset, 8-foot-tall, rosy-skinned human with enormous pink curls and a rose quartz gem set in her midsection, looks down at the viewer and extends a hand.
Means to a end, every one.

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Rose Quartz Creeps Me Out