But community organizing doesn't really do anything? Yeah, in the short term things get a *littler* better, but it's never permanent and easily destroyed and erased by capital. The world free of harm is only happening if we get lucky someday, so learning to live with how things are now is more realistic than doing the same things over and over again and hoping they'll end differently this time.
first of all, i want to take a moment to reflect on how we got here. we were talking about the (apparently contentious, much to my surprise) ending of the soft reboot of a beloved cartoon show, and now we’re debating the efficacy of communal organizing and direct action. isn’t it kind of funny how often we end up here when discussing media through a politically leftist lens? how often our critiques of media are ultimately determined by the work in question’s perceived alignment with the ideology we personally want to see reflected in it? how often we will deride popular entertainment for not being radical enough, or in the right way? how often we end up saying that independent creators working under duress need to be held accountable for their ideas?
this isn’t a bad thing necessarily. everything is political, especially pop culture. but there’s something ill in this mode of engagement, something sick. i’ve been struggling in this mine as One Who Posts for a long time now, i’ve seen waves come and go, watched ideas percolate, evolve, asphyxiate, die, be resurrected. so much of my early political education happened on this very website, where a closeted white kid from the suburbs like me could read firsthand accounts of the racially/sexually/bodily marginalized experience without moderation from outside authorities for the very first time. there is so much injustice, so much wrong with this world, and the more i learned the angrier i got, the more i wanted to Fix It by any means necessary. so i’ve put in my hours shouting praxis praxis praxis, i’ve made video essays about why Star Wars Is Leftist Actually, i’ve participated in harassment campaigns that i thought i were justified, i’ve been the victim of harassment campaigns, i’ve gained & lost in my career in equal measure playing these games, and yet here we are again having the same argument we’ve been having for years: what’s the point? why bother? who gives a shit? what difference does it make when nothing gets better, and nothing changes?
i hope you wanted a very long response, anon, because it’s what you’re about to get.
Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s 3 years of constant hormone therapy, 4 years of voice training, 12 sessions of facial hair removal, bottom surgery by the best surgeon in the country,
life as a cyber-gaucho in Neo Cordoba is not easy. i stare out the window. the sky looks like a shattered phone screen, as usual. i drink the last of my mate and plug into the matrix, selling 5000 pirated films in a second. i need to be careful though, this is Perez the Mouse’s turf, and if he catches me he’ll be having my teeth as payback
When human rights violations go unpunished, history keeps repeating itself. Armenians are experiencing it right now, again, as the world stays silent, again.
you may call it the “disputed region” of Nagorno-Karabakh or something else. It is irrelevant, there are Armenian people living here, as there have been for thousands of years—who are being subjected to ethnic cleansing, are being indiscriminately bombed, destroyed, and erased.
This isn’t about a “disputed territory”. It’s about fundamental human rights, including the right of Armenians of Karabakh to live freely and peacefully on the land of their ancestors.
What also hurts is that most don’t know/don’t care… because the media algorithm has not told them to care, so they don’t. Again.
I still firmly believe that Tatiana Maslany should have won more awards for her work in Orphan Black, she is literally like half of the cast and yet each character she plays is distinct and different enough to tell when one is pretending to be another and so on and so forth
You could literally believe that each character is played by different actors if it weren’t for the fact that they all have the same face and you wouldn’t be able to find that many actors who look alike
okay- trans women of tumblr, I wanna see if I’m alone or not on this one.
how do you feel about people getting you flowers? romantically, as friends, whatever.
In the past three years, as bills targeting gender-affirming care for transgender youth have circulated through state legislatures, some anti-trans activists have thrown around staggering detransition rates—often claiming figures as high as 80% to 90%. These numbers have surfaced everywhere from Montana’s legislative hearings on gender-affirming care bans to segments on Fox News. Chloe Cole herself has echoed these claims multiple times. Now, consider this: conservative estimates place the transgender population in the United States at over 1.5 million people. If these extremely high rates were accurate, we’d expect to see around 1.2 million detransitioners. Therapist offices would be slammed with people wanting to “change back,” hearing rooms would be packed to the brim with detransitioners, and prime time news-hour specials would feature… well, people other than Chloe Cole on a regular basis.
So when Seven News releases a special stating that they are going to cover “the most controversial topic ever covered,” featuring the same faces that we have seen in multiple ads across the world, people understandingly become skeptical. If detransitioners are so rare, why is Chloe Cole’s face the one they always use?
…
It’s worth noting that Seven News didn’t just recycle the same detransitioners commonly featured in other anti-trans specials to suggest a sweeping wave of detransitioning. The network also included images of a transgender individual who has not detransitioned, implicitly suggesting she regretted her transition.
The far right can find so few detransitioners to fuel its narrative that they are even using images of people who are not detransitioners without permission, on top of just flying the same handful of people all over the country to repeat the same bullshit in every state.
The lack of a detransition wave has even played a key role in court cases. Earlier this year, when asked to substantiate the claim that gender affirming care results in youth who will eventually regret their decisions, the state of Florida ran into a problem. They could not find a single detransitioner in the state of Florida to support the claim. As a result, the judge in the case found the facts in favor of the plaintiffs opposing Florida’s gender affirming care ban. Even in a state as populous as Florida, which has over 90,000 transgender people according to expert estimates, detransitioners appear rare.
And, as the post says, even the detransitioners that exist are generally not useful to the transphobe narrative, since they most often do so due to a lack of support and often retransition when in a better situation.
Importantly, transphobes never seem to actually care about the dignity or healthcare access of detransitioners or anything. Only about banning trans healthcare as a whole because “what if people regret it?” They are not subtle about this either. They constantly refer to trans people (detransitioned or not) as “mutilated”, “damaged”, “ruined”, and so on.
