Strong Verbs Are Just Better

A rant

2021-08-02T14:50:19Z

If your take on puberty blockers / hormones, access to, goes "there are all these people absurdly trying to protect children from puberty blockers / hormones is as ridiculous as protecting them from, say, antidepressants" I am going to assume you don't know any neurodivergent or mentally ill children, and write off your ability to assess what children need and why they do or do not get it.

I mean, you're not technically WRONG, these are very closely related phenomena! But if you make that analogy flippantly, as people keep doing, you're actually trying to imply that you wish trans kids had access to the same help mentally ill or neurodivergent kids do... which, hmm maybe in some places there are authorities happy to provide appropriate pysch meds but not hormones? But let's not pretend that "lifetime of medication" isn't an effective weapon for gender-crits precisely because many people and especially many people caring for children regard that phrase as a curse to be avoided at all costs.

That analogy is basically the trans discourse version of "why isn't my depression as easy to medicate as physical disabilities", which routinely ignores the degree to which both medication and mechanical aids are denied out of a fear that it will get worse, result in the person actually using the aid in question in the long term, or otherwise just violate the unspoken principle that trying to get by without medication is better than with, unless possibly your medication is an alternative to a structural or mechanical accommodation that would inconvenience others. You better prove you tried to do without both, though.

And doubly so for children, because we fantasise both the child body and the child mind as "natural", "pure" and to be simultaneously encouraged to toughen up, and left without "interference".

Someone in my family was given half-doses of a blood thinner, in their early teens, that was prescribed to assist in treatment of their auto-immune disease. Their parent halved the dose because they "were so thin" - kept them on child doses despite them being over 12, and considerably taller than many adults. It's not even as if PHYSCICAL ailments are exempt from this fear of medicating children.

Reluctance to give psych meds and reluctance to provide mechanical aids can both be called ableism. Reluctance to give puberty blockers and hormones cannot, but I don't think that means they're unrelated. I think ableism and transphobia, and a bunch of other problems as well (scepticism of giving women the pill for period pain, say; vaccine reluctance, which predates the ableist causes-autism scare although now entwined with it) all have deep roots in fear of BOTH bodies which are abnormal, AND of actions to intervene and modify the body. You get what you're given, and what you're given can be measured in a spectrum of perfection. Working to perfect the body, by exercise or diet, is good; adapting for the *comfort* of the body is not, and chemical interventions are cheating somehow. Deeply ingrained (Western - possibly elsewhere but I am not expert) assumptions, these.

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That's It I'm Sick of Space Australia

2017-03-31T10:23:28Z

Yanno, the memes about how earth as a whole might be ‘space australia’ (ie, terrifying and threatening to beings not from there, how the hell do people survive).

A LIST OF REASONS THIS IS A SUCKY MEME

- This meme only exists about Australia, not about any of the other alarming environments humans live in on earth. There are lot of things that can kill you in the amazon, for instance. People live in the Himalayas! People live in the Saraha! People live in the Arctic Circle!

Oh. Yeah. The meme isn’t ‘some climates are extreme’. Australia’s just the furthest-removed-from-Europe climate you can think of that WHITE PEOPLE live in.

- Only it’s not. I refer you to the entire Southern US. Aside from the hole in the ozone layer thing, these are pretty similar climates!

- You know what? Australia isn’t an uninhabitable wilderness where only the most intrepid lunatics survive. It’s pretty scary if you’re white people used to Europe, I guess? Indigenous Australians were doing just fine at living with the climate and the local fauna and flora before we showed up, and they still are!

My point is: the source meme about Australia being a terrifying deadly place is pretty terrible. It’s insulting to the entire population of the continent; it’s really ridiculous coming from Americans (I mean, aside from the fact that you guys have guns, your continent is pretty terrifying, too. You get BEARS in your BACKYARDS. Allligators in your drains! Rattlesnakes! Earthquakes! You keep living in New Orleans!). And there’s this not-very-thinly veiled level of racism, in that the standard of ‘hospitable environment’ is skewed massively toward ‘what do white people think is ideal’.

Then you go and add space colonialism. Either Earth being colonised FROM space - when did an inhospitable environment EVER stop an imperialist power from setting up somewhere? Here, a comparison to Australia would indeed be appropriate. Or you want to ‘send the Australians’ to an inhospitable desert planet full of poisonous things in space. I just know the Australians you’re picturing there are, well, me. White people who gave got used to sunburn from hell and think 44 degrees is liveable weather. (And if you were picturing Indigenous Australians... great, now you’ve got a fantasy about transplanting them off the entire planet instead of off their traditional lands. Unless you are indigenous, maybe don’t do that.)

This has been: Australia is a perfectly nice continent, and was a lot nicer before white people and climate change, will you please think for a minute before exploiting it as your source meme for ‘the worst place to live’.

Ony I'm not putting this on Tumblr because that would be an invitation to Discourse.

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There are times I wish I didn't have a boyfriend

2013-09-23T16:45:49Z

Not times I wish I didn't have this particular boyfriend (well, there are those too, particularly over such contentious issues as whether or not I can be trusted to order food in French), but any boyfriend.

Today, for instance, it took me quite some time to convince a barber that I really did want a buzz cut. This was negotiated in English, in which the barber was fluent, so language wasn't the problem. No, he just didn't believe a white woman* was really serious about wanting all her hair chopped off (note: I had less than an inch of growth on my scalp when I walked in there). He started with #3 clippers and insisted on working down from there rather than going straight to #1.

Eventually he cottoned on that I was serious, and I liked my hair almost non-existent. At that point, he said to me:

"Does your boyfriend like it, what you've done to your hair?"

It's times like that, I wish I didn't have a boyfriend. 'Don't have one, don't care' would be a pretty good response (but it might get me a lecture on what The Men Like, too).

The best snappy answer would be one involving the words "my girlfriend likes it just fine".

Questions like that would annoy me were I straight, of course. But I'm not, and every time I get asked them I feel stuck, because given a few different turns of chance, the snappy lesbian comeback could've been mine. "My boyfriend has long enough hair for two of us", while a good answer in itself, isn't fixing the fact that some guy with a hairdressing qualification has utterly failed to consider that unusual hairstyles might also go with statistically unusual sexual orientations.

It's a feminist problem, naturally: the assumption that all or most women's lives and choices hang on a male partner's life and opinion. But there's also assumed heterosexuality. Denying the existence of the boyfriend would be a lie, but I feel like I'm somehow lying by admitting to having a boyfriend, as well.

The same thing happens when one is single, too. All possible answers to 'do you have a boyfriend' become lies on some level. "No, I don't (but even if I were dating it might not be a man, except also it might be, aaargh, let's not even start)". About the ONLY time when, as a bi lady, I've felt like I was honestly answering that question, was when the answer was "No, but my girlfriend..." (And then only if the conversation participants had met prior boyfriends.**)

In other news, I hear today is Bi Visibility Day.

And my boyfriend's punishment for his part in the heteropatriarchy shall be that he must clipper my head, or at least find me a cheap barber near his abode.

~

*He acknowledged, slightly sadly, that he has given close crops to many African women. He was nappy-haired himself, with a rather cute crop of coils 1-2 inches long.
** Of the two lies, I'd rather be taken for a lesbian. It feels to me as if the assumptions people make based on 'interested in women' are more accurate w/r/to me than those based on presumed heterosexuality. Or it's homophobic stereotypes, which I don't wish to disown or evade just because I happen to date men too.

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The Moon

2011-04-19T21:22:04Z

“the moon”
Andrew Michael Roberts

all the other moons
get their own names.

I am quite angry with the moon today. It's been causing people to ask Trojie stupid questions about earthquakes (hint: they are not caused by phases of the moon) and one of my idjut Facebook friends is trying to tell people that the fact that Easter dating is associated with the moon means it's really a pagan festival.

Not, y'know, that Passover has anything to do with it. *facepalms*

I BLAME THE MOON

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Why does Tony Abbot keep opening his mouth?

2011-02-25T00:31:21Z

Apparently he's happy we're helping out NZ at the moment because "they're family, not foreigners".

Firstly there's the unpleasant implication that foreigners should *not* be gladly helped, which I am happy to see that several people are grumbling about in the letters page of the SMH.

But there's also the strange idea that family and foreigners are mutually exclusive categories.

Show of hands all those whose family ARE foreigners!

I myself am not possessed of any overseas family - my nearest immigrant ancestor was my great-grandfather, back before England counted as foreign in the Australian mind - and so far as I know the only one of my relatives to *leave* Australia permanently since then is a second-cousin who moved to Canada and hasn't had anything to do with my branch of the family since then. But non-indigenous Australians have *always* come from places overseas (obviously; otherwise we wouldn't be here), and there have always been (sufficiently affluent) Australians traveling back to wherever it was their family had come from, or on to other places for all sorts of reasons. People who travel sometimes stay. Sometimes they marry and bring new families back with them.

Foreigners are our family, Tony.

*goes off grumbling*

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