just fyi, tumblr user @ reyton who wormed their nasty way into being popular in the star wars fandom is a huge transphobe/racist who changed their url from lalondes/teenagevictorysong a while back, please block and unfollow for your own good
i forgot to add it, but saying theyre “transphobic” is a bit misleading: theyre specifically transmisogynist
I mean like and if u wanna say ‘they’ve changed’ literally not even a month ago they reblogged some buzzfeed thing tht was someone getting pissy tht trans woman ‘get more media’ and about a month ago they were talking over woc
plus they exploited the accidental death of a black minor for notes and never responded to the people who called them out for it
 Anonymous |
sex is biological??????????????? go open a biology textbook?????????????????? its not a social construct ur thinking of gender???????????? |
i hope the superabundance of question marks is an indication that you’re aware on some level of how utterly wrong you are. [trigger warning: discussion of genitalia and internal organs] first of all, when you say “sex” i assume you’re talking about what is called “biological sex”, “sexual dimorphism”, or “sexual difference.” specifically what you are trying to state or imply here is the material existence of two categories of bodies: male and female. i’m gonna guess you’re starting with chromosomes since that’s been considered the ‘most fundamental’ basis of sex by transmisogynists since at least 1979. a sex chromosome is a particular-appearing blob that shows up on a karyotype, or a test involving dyeing and microscopically viewing chromosomes. chromosomes are little blobs of folded up goop that if you spooled it out long enough you would find to be a chain of DNA—which is to say a chain of base pairs (guanine and cytosine, adenine and thymine). what you’re also gonna find in there are histones that the chromatin (the material of somewhat spooled DNA) is wrapped around. In addition, you’re gonna find methylation, and all other sorts of little chemicals and particles in there because guess what? DNA is not a linear coding system. DNA codes in chunks—usually triplets that are usually read as certain amino acids, which then come together to form the building blocks of proteins. but the thing about triplet coding is that it can be very complex. so AGGCTTATTAGGCTCTA can for example simultaneously code as AGG CTT ATT AGG CTC ta and a GGC TTA TTA GGC TCT a and ag GCT TAT TAG GCT CTA like just to give you an example. now there are signals indicating how that coding should start, but those signals can move around, or be turned on or off. that’s one of the things methylation is for—it can turn on or off the signals of where to start the coding chain. methylation for any given part of a DNA strand can be triggered by all sorts of things. one study found a linkage between rates of diabetes and levels of stress in the grandmothers of those with diabetes—i.e. the stress was linked to diabetes in the grandchildren. that’s just to give you some idea of the level of complexity of coding. and the complexities continue at every level. the proteins that are formed by those DNA sequences may come together in different ways depending on the chemical composition of their environment. the DNA itself—a three-dimensional object in the same environment—may physically interact with the proteins or with itself. but also remember that we are talking about chemical goop subject to environmental conditions, which include all sorts of mutagens. sometimes shit just goes weird (not gonna say ‘wrong’ because that presumes that mutations are ‘bad’ which is bullshit given the necessity of mutation for genetic adaptability—also it means applying anthropocentric notions of functionality, of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behavior, to goop) and AGG CTT ATT loses a letter and becomes AGC TTA tt (this is what’s called a frameshift mutation—you can also have other stuff like point mutations). also, things can just go weird when the DNA is being replicated—it’s not a perfect reading process, it’s a bunch of chemical reactions floating in goop. and it’s happening millions of times, so the likelihood that things will go wrong in various ways is high. but even above the level of the DNA coding, on the level of the chromosomes, things are confusing. because the chromosomes come together out of more loosely distributed goop when the cell is splitting, and things can go wrong in that process—get misplaced, get shuffled over to the other side, etc. likewise, there’s a process called crossing-over that occurs at cell replication during metaphase (while the chromosomes are paired at the center of the cell prior to the nucleus dividing) where chromosomes just swap shit around for the heck of it. and it’s pretty random where this happens too, which can mean that important codes just get cut in half, or new codes get created. all of which is leading to say that it’s incredibly unlikely to expect any sort of meaningful fifty-fifty split between “XX chromosomes” and “XY chromosomes”. which works with reality, because in reality we observe all kinds of variations, exactly as we would expect. now, what happens when there’s variation? for the most part, things just happen. it’s all just cells. they do their thing, make little organs, replicate so the organs get bigger and more specific, etc. so maybe now you can begin to see why expecting them to neatly behave in two sets of patterns is completely inaccurate? or why it is that in the real world we observe a wide range of human bodies rather than just XX Barbies and XY Kens? but even looking beyond that, what’s actually going on with the so-called reproductive system? well, some of these cells have the ability to generate gametes—sorta like half-cells—which can get together with other gametes to grow into another big blob of organs. that’s what fertilization and pregnancy is. that’s all that’s involved. generally speaking, one type of gametes will appear in the bodies of people whose cells tend to have goop that shows up a certain way on a karyotype, while another type of gametes will appear in the bodies of people whose cells tend to have goop that shows up a different way in a karyotype, with a whole lot of variation and possibilities for things to be disrupted. so why does that even matter to us? why am I sitting here at 4am on christmas night with a box of cheezits and a glass of wine answering shitty anons about this? [note: i wrote this a couple days ago and am only now posting it] because out of those general tendencies of bodies, people have constructed the notion of sex. patriarchy, at its basis, is a system of economic exploitation that consists of one group of people being assigned to do work which is valued, and another group of people being assigned to do work which is not valued. this was mapped onto two general groupings of people, those who tended to have one type of gamete and those who tended to have another, and the ones who pushed the idea that their own work was valuable were ‘males’, ‘men’, etc, while those who were forced to be the object of exploitation and violence were ‘females’, ‘women’, etc. as part of the process of valuing male work, men constructed an explanation for the inequality that they claimed derived from the nature of physical reality. specifically, the notion of ‘sexual difference’, or the tendencies of people to produce different sorts of gametes. in order to better justify and value their exploitation of women, men constructed a whole notion of selfhood around this, an ideal which for them happened to be contained in the organ that most of them used to distribute the gametes. and in order to justify the violence that they were doing, they argued that there were naturally only two categories of people, grouped based on labor done/positions during sex/gamete production/etc (all these things were conflated and differently emphasized over time, helping to mystify the falsity of the distinction). the notion that certain types of organs map to certain types of behavior, certain economic patterns, etc, is a product of a social system of oppression. it is NOT founded in any sort of ‘biological fact’ because first and foremost ‘biological fact’ does not exist. an organ is not a signifier except in the context of a socially constructed ‘biology’ which is specifically constructed as a justification of patriarchy. quite literally. i’ve worked with biologists (yeah, anon, turns out i may have in fact opened a biology textbook a few times in my life) and one thing i can say definitively is that like most scientists they don’t tend to think deeply about how the sorts of questions they ask and the ways they interpret data are structured by the world. at best they’ve taken a required bioethics class or two while an undergrad. so when they’re going to interpret mathematical data, they’re doing it in a way that already presumes the real question as answered. they find sexual dimorphism not because it’s in the results of their data but because it was assumed by the way they asked their questions—if you ask ‘which sex is better at math?’ you’re never going to find evidence that ‘sex’ is a meaningless construct. this is what a lot of ‘scientific truth’ is, in fact—the things that were already accepted when people went to ask more complicated questions, and which were only torn down, if ever, when all the answers to all the complicated questions continually revealed something which undermined the previous model (which, by the way, is happening right now with the notion of sex—that’s right, even patriarchal scientists are coming to an awareness of how utterly bullshit it is, albeit by the most roundabout way possible and still doing as much harm as they can on the way). But what we can see from all this is that gender precedes sex. gender is a way of organizing the social sphere, and biological data is organized off of that. gender, in other words, is the fundamental category of sex under patriarchy. now, one might say that we live in a social world, that our subjectivities are socially constructed, and thus for us an organ is a signifier. this is of course true, but one has to recognize the socially constructed nature in order to realize first and foremost that we are not looking at a rigid system here. it is not simply a matter of saying that under biological reality a certain chromosome or a certain organ leads to a certain place within patriarchy, and likewise it is not simply a matter of saying that under social construction a certain chromosome or a certain organ leads to a certain place within patriarchy. if one is aware of the complexity involved in socially constituting what is basically a blob of goo (cells) that does or does not more goo (babies, people, etc) as belonging to a somehow binary and rigid category, one can more easily see how that social construction may at times slip, and result in a person who, for example, has one sort of organ, and yet has had their identity socially constructed within the category for a person with a “different” (within patriarchal notions of ‘sexual difference’) type of organ. in fact, one can only fail to recognize this if one begins from the disingenuous place of assuming a priori that the person in question is being deceptive or being deceived, rather than reporting reality as closely as it can be reported in this language. and the use of inversions of this language to report closer realities is an effort to redirect and gain control of biopower as it has enacted itself on us. it is no more or less legitimate than the language of patriarchy, except if one finds legitimacy either in supporting patriarchy (arguing for sex as ‘real’) or disrupting patriarchy. what, then, is sex? it’s the way people talk about blobs of goop, and specifically the way that blobs of goop have been categorized into two types, in broad defiance of reality, for the express purpose of perpetuating the patriarchy. so yes, sex is biological, in the sense that the terms of sex are coded into the discourse of ‘biology’, which is itself socially constructed by patriarchy. sex is a social construct. this is my final fucking word on this shit. do NOT bring this ignorant shit into my inbox again. |
 posttraumaticspacelesbian |
hahaha do you remember this sick own?
“Open a biology book”
“FRIEND I *AM* A BIOLOGY BOOK.”
Excellent takedown. <3
One way that Whites can continue to control the language by which people of colour–and most often Black people (since anti-Blackness means Black bodies are used as ground zero for oppression in juxtaposition to or “antithetical” to Whiteness itself, and primarily because so much anti-oppression research and scholarship is created by Black people, which is regularly appropriated as we are erased from it)–discuss oppression is to invoke the notion of people of colour as unilateral oppressors of Whites who are oppressed for other facets of their identities. Obviously this is anti-intersectional because the single issue approach to oppression does not account for the fact that oppression types vary and intersect and none of them erase White supremacy itself. In other words, Whites who are oppressed for other facets of their identities (i.e. gender, sexual orientation, class, ability) still have White privilege and still benefit from racism and White supremacy. And since Whiteness determines what is deemed “accurate” and “valuable” scholarship–even about the oppression that Whites do not face, such as racism–this same Whiteness is used to control and police how Black people can speak about oppression.
One way to silence and control is to view oppression through an anti-intersectional lens at best and just straight up make up false claims of bigotry at worst. I mentioned experiencing false claims from Whites in my essay I Will Not Tolerate Whites REGULARLY Making FALSE Claims About Me Being Bigoted. These are the same Whites that often think that using Black experiences as “metaphors” to explain their own White privilege away because of some other form of oppression is them “practicing intersectionality.” Practicing what I actually live, intersectionality, a concept first articulated by a Black woman, Kimberlé Crenshaw (though Black women been living it) and expounded upon by Patricia Hill Collins and other Black women scholars. I explained this anti-Blackness being mistaken for intersectionality in White People Using Blackness and Anti-Black Racism Analogies For Their Experiences Is NOT Intersectionality.
One of the most common areas where false claims of bigotry and White supremacy thrives (through racist notions about Black bodies, which I discussed in a Storify, Racist Myths About Black People As Inherently Able-Bodied and Neurotypical) is in discussions and discourse about ableism, though as I mentioned in the essay at the end of the last paragraph, literally every oppressed group has a White person or a White “ally” as the face of that group. That’s White supremacy. In regards to ableism, rarely how White supremacy, racism and anti-Blackness actually create mental health issues for Black people is discussed, how it impacts already detrimental mental health issues for Black people discussed nor does how the healthcare system is virulently racist comes up. (I discussed this in more detail through my own experiences in On Blackness and Perceptions of Able-Bodied Privilege.) Rarely is PTSD for Black people who live in poverty ever addressed. Rarely is how the violence inflicted upon Black bodies where disabilities that occur in response to violence addressed (i.e. I grew up and live in an area where seeing young Black men in wheelchairs because of violence is common and daily), nor is the stress upon Black people who can become pregnant where those issues impact the pregnancy and the physical and mental health of offspring of concern in these White-centered discourses on disability. And now when Black people discuss the sociopathy inherent in White supremacy, that’s referred to as “ableist” by Whites? This is not ableism.
While Anti-Social Personality Disorder and psychopathy are regularly conflated with sociopathy, the latter includes when a belief system results in learned behaviors that can have mass anti-empathetic consequences. While Anti-Social Personality Disorder speaks to an individual mental health issue that impacts daily interaction, speaking of collective social and learned antipathy, resentment and even hatred (though oppression doesn’t require hatred) as sociopathy because of White supremacy is not a mental health diagnosis whereby mentioning it in a derogatory way is ableism. It is a social condition that fosters oppression and is in response to being oppressors. Oppression does not only change the oppressed; the oppressor is also changed. Sociopathy is not even a mental health diagnosis and does not refer to an individualized mental health issue, though its manifestations can be individualized. The sheer pleasure that someone like George Zimmerman gets from the attention he receives by harming others and murdering Trayvon Martin directly connects to anti-Blackness and White supremacy and an entire system supporting his behavior. (And do not dare mention his mother’s heritage right now because anti-Blackness allows him to access White male privilege despite his ethnicity.) This same mass disregard for Black life can be seen in Renisha McBride’s death or Jordan Davis’ death or the multiple other ways that Whites disregard Black life and how it seems common place and learned. The common nature of this in addition to the power ascribed upon White supremacy is why Black and other people of colour also internalize the lack of empathy and worthlessness ascribed upon non-White bodies.
Whites seeking to silence the truth about White supremacy are ever too glad to denounce the existence of what reads as sociopathic or where a group of people have a long term pattern of manipulating, exploiting or violating the rights of others. When research confirms that Whites feel lack of empathy towards Black pain, feel that Black bodies are made for handling pain (which would be the actual ableism here–i.e. the Strong Black Woman and Angry Black Woman stereotypes are inherently ableist–however conveniently ignored) and when they learn that Black people are harmed more by police, the criminal justice system and Prison Industrial Complex, they want stricter regulations to continue that harm, that at the core is a learned lack of empathy as a social condition, while feeling zero responsibility for how that lack of empathy in addition to their own privilege actually oppresses Black people. How do you classify people who are glad to see Black people die? How do you classify people who teach “inherent inferiority” of Black people as the foundation of their own identities? How do you classify people who think it is acceptable or even funny to dehumanize and reduce Black people to costumes, tropes, stereotypes or slaves? How ha ha funny is it to wear a Trayvon Martin Halloween costume now or gather around for a Saturday picnic as a Black man or a Black woman was lynched and castrated or raped in the past? How do I classify a White woman in another continent who tried to derail a campaign I created for my brother who was brutally attacked solely because our lives are automatic lies to her and being right about “fraud” for which she had no proof mattered more than his life? (He’s doing a lot better over these last few months.) The actual collective emotional politics are more than abstract laws, institutions or policies. It is human choice and interaction and while not a mental health illness, Whiteness as a social position (not solely being White and from a particular place) has many sociopathic facets.
As Flavia Dzodan notes in her essay Whiteness As Social Disease and Ableism:
I am not trying to gloss over the implication for mental health and for the stigmas associated with mental illness. Yet, I also realized that for many of us, myself included, whiteness can only be described as a social disease. We lack words to explain this in ways that do not further stigmatize people. I am aware that saying racism is sociopathic could be interpreted as ableist and yet, how do we describe a culture wide phenomenon that kills us? how do we describe a political system founded on our shared inhumanity? how do we describe an oppression that is rooted in lack of empathy and love towards us?
Then it becomes a matter of what language is “acceptable” and when this language is controlled by Whites in a White supremacist society, conveniently they have the power to decide what language can be used to describe how they oppress people of colour. She also notes:
One of the consequences of epistemic injustice is that we do not have accepted frameworks to explain our lives. By “accepted,” I mean, frameworks that are society-wide accepted and recognized as valid throughout academia, mainstream media and public discourses including but not limited to policy and laws.
The same White supremacy that refuses to acknowledge “womanism,” wants to erase Blackness from “intersectionality,” and thinks that “misogynoir” is make-believe since the word was created by a Black woman, Moya Bailey, and not by Whites and is “new” though the concept and experience is centuries old is the same White supremacy that conveniently wants White supremacy left without critique and conflates social conditions with diagnosed mental health issues. In fact, this conflation is what is ableist.
Using mental health issues as a shield or conflation in order to escape critique for White supremacy is not new. In fact, last year when Hugo Schwyzer’s abuse of several women of colour including Flavia who I quoted here and others came to “mainstream” light, many tried to blame his mental health issues for the fact that White supremacy is why he was given a platform and impunity to abuse. No one wants to explain why a Black male feminist could not have the same opportunity to abuse for years on end with White women’s support. And then his mental health issues were used to silence critique of White supremacy, which I alluded to in How EVERYONE Works Together To Silence Women of Colour’s Critiques of Mainstream Feminism. While suggesting that anyone with mental health issues is an abuser is in fact ableist (as I do not abuse people despite having anxiety and PTSD), not holding someone accountable for their abuse because of mental health issues is also ableist. It implies inferiority and lack of accountability are acceptable for them as if they are not fully worthwhile human beings like everyone else. The same mental health scapegoat to protect White supremacy stance is regularly used in cases of White male terrorism. No such mental health analyses are provided when Black people commit crimes. The very racist in addition to ableist notion that criminality is inherent in Blackness and thereby uncontrollable is used to mask how racism and inequality contributes to Black criminality in the first place.
But this is not the same thing as saying a social and culturally taught lack of empathy, responsibility, accountability and sense of fairness that is at the core of White supremacy is a mental health issue. It is not. It is social and it is taught and reinforced through institutional racism and socially via media. It is why the extrajudicial killing of Black people does not even remotely awaken the senses of Whites, many of which think we deserve to die while in the same breath will yell about intraracial crime (which is common for every race) as “Black on Black crime” as if that itself is arbitrary and unrelated to the impact of White supremacy. Are they individually “sick” where we are “mocking” their illness when we mention White supremacy and sociopathy? No. But the oppression that is White supremacy cannot be ignored nor viewed solely as intellectual or legislative experience. It most certainly is behavioral and emotional. But it being the latter does not make it a mental illness. It makes it the status quo, actually.
Conveniently organic epistemology is not acceptable nor is using “standard” terms to describe what oppressors do because those oppressors decide that they’re “oppressed” when how they oppress is critiqued. And the DSM-IV-TR itself is not without critique nor safe from the confines of White supremacy. The racism involved in schizophrenia diagnoses for Black men and depression versus anxiety diagnoses for Black women, or the fact that being gay was long considered a mental health issue in previous DSM editions needs to be considered before this book becomes the standard for what is ableism or not through White policing. Oh and since Whites and White credentials are what is “accepted” in determining what terminology can be used and how in regards to oppression, I do have 3 degrees in the behavioral sciences and over a decade of research on the matter. Is this acceptable…since living as a Black woman and facing what reads as sociopathy supported by ideology, culture and institutions as the foundation of White supremacy does not count as acceptable knowledge?
Black people–especially ones like me who deal with mental health issues and physical issues–have to be willing to interrogate why is White supremacy okay in disability discourse if it is not okay in anything else. I say this since many Black feminists, womanists and other social justice advocates are perfectly okay with Whites setting the agenda and controlling what is deemed “ableist,” what matters in terms of mental health, making disability a “raceless” or anti-intersectional conversation, and ignoring how disabled Whites can still be racist and use White supremacy to shape their discourse on disability as well as on mental and physical health. White supremacy must be interrogated anywhere and everywhere it appears. Obviously the concern that people will inaccurately process sociopathy as a “diagnosis” and thereby excuse racism and let Whites off the hook is a legitimate one. However, I am not suggesting that “sociopathy” replaces the word “racism” or “White supremacy.” For what? Those terms work. What I do suggest is acknowledging that racism is not solely an intellectual exercise plus privilege but also collectively learned behaviors of abuse, manipulation and a lack of empathy that is supported by the status quo. White supremacy is why calling the very same White supremacist actions that fit existing definitions of sociopathy can be called “ableism” by the same people who get to decide what is “ableist” or not because of White supremacy. It’s a feedback loop dedicated to the status quo.
“I will state flatly that the bulk of this country’s White population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been White, if I may so put it, too long; they have been married to the lie of White supremacy too long; the effect in the personalities, their lives, their grasp of realty, has been as devastating as the lava which so memorably immobilized the citizens of Pompeii. They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself.” - James Baldwin
(via finnskyvalker)
When people attack disabled people for being ‘fakers’ they are attacking disabled people
Our very existence is considered suspect
The unwillingness to believe in disability IS ableism
(via noidboid)
(ok I’ll stop now whoops.)
ITS ALL U BUDDY
PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT PFF N GN RUVN *DIARRHEA NOISES*
probably because ive seen this all before and nothing you’re saying is worth more than a gif.
By the by, if you guys are getting annoyed by this influx of inane messages, block the “trollbabble” tag. ill be putting it there until i get tired of dealing with this dumbass and turn off submissions.
that’s cool but why are you telling me