I should mention:

Haruka is in a qipao because a Chinese friend specifically asked they be put in one. We’ve been thinking about changing it for a while reagardless of that.

Edits are actually free. That’s why the initial cost of the images is so high. You did not want to see these characters in the edits that weren’t shown.

Any people complaining about how the characters aren’t trans* enough can get themselves to a damn stadium.

[...]

It’s amazing. People know we aren’t a major company, but they expect much more from us than they do any major company. They talk shit about how they reblogged something…uh, we aren’t on tumblr ALL DAY. There is no way we could see every reblog. That’s why we ask people to send EMAIL.

You reblog something on a massive site that only leaves the last 15-20 reblogs on a page and expect us to spend all day searching for critique instead of actually working on the things people claim we’re not working on?

Jesus fuck, we’re not heaven, we’re not god, and we’re NOT omniscient. SEND A DAMN EMAIL. Everyone’s who sent an email with critique has gotten a response, along with severe thanks for actually giving us something we can be sure to read. Reblogging and complaining we didn’t see it is essentially being angry with us for not doing exactly what we shouldn’t be doing…not working on the fucking game and spending all day digging around tumblr for things to reply to. Y’all ain’t new to tumblr. You know this shit gets mad busted and makes things disappear, and yet you expect us to magically…control things we can’t possibly control. Right. Gotcha.

About the “anti-white we don’t let white people on the team” shit. Uh. The PoC writer thing we put up is because at that point in time, MOST of the writing team was white. And we wanted to balance it out. Once again, people talking shit when they have no fucking clue.

As far as “OMG AAA GAME ON SUCH A TINY BUDGET!!!” We’re aiming high. Perhaps not AAA-level, but we’re aiming as high as we can. The POINT of this project is to aim high. Because there’s nothing like this at a high level.

delux_vivens

A few weeks ago, I broke a longstanding personal rule and left a comment on a mainstream, very popular, award-winning U.S. gay blog. A long string of comments by mostly gay men (if web identities count for anything) supported the U.K.’s decision to consider sexual rights in granting aid. Many of the commentators condemned not simply homophobia and transphobia in Africa, but African governments and African citizens, the former explicitly the latter implicitly. “My tax dollars should not fund homophobia,” was a typical comment.

[...]

More to the point, and to repeat something I’ve written before: positioning African queers as economic threats or as economic competition to other local, regional, and national projects renders us more vulnerable. In a country like Kenya where money is King, telling government agencies that money will not show up for a government project because queers are not treated well will most probably not result in better legislation or, more practically, better living conditions for queers. (Given Kenya’s strategic importance in the region and that we are happily killing Somalis for the Americans, I think our aid is safe.)

I realize that aid conditionality often has nothing to do with those populations deemed to be at risk. Or, rather, is based on information provided by “experts” who have “conducted studies” to “determine what is needed” and rarely, if ever, takes into consideration local needs and local situations, except as these are filtered through really fucked up lenses. I have sat through multiple presentations where so-called “experts” diagnosed Africans—yes, such collective terms are used too often—and heard myself described in ways I found utterly bewildering, reduced to a helpless, clueless child. When one speaks up at such meetings, one is told that one is an exception; no doubt, my U.S. education helped me grow toward civilization.

The shit hit the fan in the trans blogosphere last night, when it came to light that there is a disturbing new section in the Identity Screening Regulations used in airports throughout Canada. Simply put, Transgender People are Completely Banned From Boarding Airplanes in Canada.

The offending section of the regulations reads:

5.2 (1) An air carrier shall not transport a passenger if …
(c) the passenger does not appear to be of the gender indicated on the identification he or she presents;

Although this obviously discriminatory smear of regulation did not come to significant public attention until very recently, it apparently came into effect on July 27th, 2011.

It is important to note that these regulations are not actually a piece of legislation, which would have had to pass through readings and votes in the House and Senate (which is probably why it went unnoticed until now). Rather, the Identity Screening Regulations are a set of rules implemented unilaterally by the Ministry of Transportation, as part of Canada’s so-called Passenger Protect, which is essentially the Canadian Federal Government’s equivalent to the U.S.’s “no-fly” list.

Also #transgender ppl r not "completely banned" from airplanes in Canada, its the folks who's gender presentation doesn't match their ID.

It has been and continues to be a challenge for me to resist the Western, imperialist constructions of gender. This conflict has been my *only* source of gender confusion and dysphoria. Before I was kicked out of my dad’s house, I was perfectly comfortable with my gender. But as I became entirely surrounded by the Western gaze, with no refuge, I began to feel discord with my gender and body. I have spent years struggling with my gender only to realize that the issue was not about my relation to my body but my relation to how the West views my body. My gender dysphoria was the result of Western imperialism.

[...]Eventually, these experiences (and a toxic friendship) convinced me to throw my skirts away (lovingly hand crocheted by myself) and make up, so that I could be a ‘man.’

Trying to live up to this Western, gender normative notion of ‘man’ did a lot of damage to myself. I’m getting over it, but it hasn’t been easy. And as I exit this stage of my life I’ve been re-examining my relationship with the trans umbrella (and the cis/trans binary). Ultimately, I’m resisting this label too, partially out of mistrust and a fear that even trying out this better, but still Western, conception of gender will still do damage to me. And I think it would. Because accepting the trans label as a bakla means that I’m defining and understanding my gender within a Western context. It is an acceptance of the imperialism and continued colonization of my body by the West.

My gender identity, and its expression, exist outside of the Western construction of gender. It is the product of a culture that, while it has a colonial past, is its own.

Toronto couple Kathy Witterick and David Stocker did the usual thing that any parents do when their new child is born, they sent out an email notice noting their new baby’s vital statistics and eye color. But what they did differently was to leave short, simple statement about their baby, named Storm.

It read:

“We’ve decided not to share Storm’s sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm’s lifetime (a more progressive place? …”

Essentially what Witterick and Stoker have decided is to not assume that Storm is cisgender and to leave it to Storm to figure out whom zie is for zimself in the spirit of self determination and autonomy, free of coercive gender stereotyping.

[...]

2. “This is social experiment with a political agenda.”

Again we see the effects of cis-centric thinking at work here. The truth is that I’m an experiment, you’re an experiment and we’re all experiments of a cis-supremacist and misogynistic society. Saying this ignores that children are influenced by gender stereotypes and depictions of gendered behavior dozens, perhaps hundreds of times a day. People only notice this when someone refuses to conform to these stereotypes or decides not to teach them to their children, as Storm’s parents are doing.

Socialization can come in good and bad forms. For example many kids today are socialized in to racist ideology and behavior. Yet we don’t talk about the evils of that kind of socialization because it would challenge white supremacy prevalent in American society. And in this case, we don’t hear about objections over gender socialization until people are giving their children the free will in a challenge to cis-supremacy.

And our normative gender relations and stereotyping have an enormous political agenda, namely in defending patriarchy, heterosexism and cis-supremacy to the bitter end.

We don’t have the scientific background to vet this research properly, but let’s just say we’re more than a bit skeptical. Others have done so, though, including Marianne Kirby.

Kanazawa is no stranger to controversy. Last year, he published a study claiming that liberals and athiests were smarter than conservatives and believers. And yet P.Z. Myers, an avowed “godless liberal,” called him the “great idiot of social science,” according to a story in AlterNet.

We’ve tried to contact Psychology Today and Kanazawa for comment, and will update with anything we hear back.

Most representations of people labeled as not male and not female are very similar, and tend to share some basic characteristics. They are thin or slender. They have flat chests and narrow hips. They tend to have more angular features. When people are asked to picture someone ‘androgynous’ or to visualize a person of ‘indeterminate’ gender, this is usually the mental image that arises. Note, please, that many of these traits are traditionally associated with masculinity. Nonbinary people can occupy a range of gender identities and bodies, including bodies like this, but people often assume that all of us share this appearance and this specific body type, that people who do not look this way are somehow faking or pretending.

Someone like me, with fat, broad hips, breasts, and soft features, is read as female, because I do not fit the image of a nonbinary person.[...]

Feminism discusses body image and normative trends about bodies a lot. Sometimes it even tosses a few scraps to trans women when discussions about body image take place. But feminism is silent on nonbinary people; there isn’t a huge body of work talking about nonbinary body image and, specifically, how antifemininity ties in with the relationships we have with our bodies. And how fighting antifemininity in feminism might, just possibly, make the world safer for us.

ontd_feminism

dingsi

We all begin life with genitals that have four basic external elements. At the top is the part numbered 1 on my drawing: the sensitive end of the phalloclitoris, which can differentiate into the head of the penis or clitoris. In the center is structure 2: an inset membrane that can widen or can seal as the fetus develops. It will form the urethra, and the vagina, if any. Around it is structure 3, which is capable of differentiation into either a phallic shaft, or clitoral body and labia minora. And at the outside is the fourth part, the labioscrotal swellings, which can develop into labia majora or a scrotum.

There is a lot of variation in how each of the four basic parts of the genitalia develop from person to person in all of us. For example, we acknowledge with a lot of rib-elbowing the variation in penile size. Variation in the size and shape of genitalia, and in other parts of the body, is part of human diversity. Surgeons are well aware that livers and lungs and blood vessels vary a lot between individuals, and may look quite different from an iconic anatomical diagram. But we rarely care about having an unusually shaped liver. The shape of genitals, however, is given huge cultural weight, because we pin our commitment to dyadic gender roles on them. We look at the shape of a newborn's genitalia and project a future of dresses and diets and talking about emotions, or sports and strength and getting under the hood of a car. We do know that people are complicated. Most of us want to be more than walking gender stereotypes. Still, we understand people through the lens of dyadic gender difference, and intersex people call that into question. When we see a baby born with intermediate genitalia, and can't project a future for them based on our well-known gender narratives, people in our society--including doctors--freak out.

It all started about a month ago when a public suicide of a frustrated, disillusioned Tunisian grew into widespread anger. Days later the ink-spot has been ever growing in an unprecedented scope and magnitude.

The outcry against unemployment rapidly evolved into a popular movement asking for Ben Ali to leave power, for corruption to be rooted out and for the repressive police apparatus to be held accountable for human rights abuses.

In autumn 2010, Knopf published a “transgender” themed young adult novel. The author, Catherine Ryan Hyde, is an estranged relative of mine.

The analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Hyde’s young adult fiction novel will come from those who are living the identities, and oppressions to which she has applied her imagination.

However, as part of the media coverage and publicity tour for the release of the young adult novel, Hyde claims much of her expertise and authority for writing her “transgender”-themed young adult novel as based on my life and identity.

[...] Since I became acutely ill in October 2007, it has been very hard for me to write, or to speak. So it is opportunistic and unconscionable that a hostile relative would take this opportunity to re-tell my life in a way that changes my sex, mis-describes my gender expression, and closets my sexuality. Hyde also attempts to silence me politically as a revolutionary, reasserts the dominant legal control of the biological family, and ignores and disrespects my chosen family.

My verbal and written request for no further contact has been violated by my relatives numerous times over the last forty years. So I do not rely on them to respect my wishes. Instead, I have clarified and strengthened my legal papers, and I am making this statement public: My living biological relatives—Irving David Feinberg, Betty Vance Hyde, and Catherine Ryan Hyde—are not my family. They do not speak for me.

Chavez is one of over 500 women in Juarez who have been found murdered in the last decade. And her death has caused an uproar because she had been one of few to speak out against the growing femicide, coining the phrase, “Ni una mas,” (“Not one more) and routinely criticizing local authorities for refusing to properly investigate the crimes. Her death has cast new suspicions about local authorities’ ability to handle the cases. That is to say that they’ve largely chosen to ignore them; so far, 92 percent of cases of women who’ve been murdered in the region remain unsolved.

keeva

I never set myself up as an expert. I freely admitted that I am more or less cisgendered, and writing for an audience who are more or less cisgendered as well. Our trans audience is small. I need to write to a larger audience. I needed to make some points clear, such as the fact that trans men and women are just men and women who have a hell of a lot more shit to deal with than most people. I asked if he would feel comfortable ticking the 'male' and 'bi' boxes because I don't feel comfortable ticking a 'female' box.

As to my terminology, I know the current debate about what is the acceptable terminology. I know that no matter what words I choose to use, someone will take offense to them. MtF, FtM, and female-bodied seemed to be the easiest to get my point across at this moment. I know that trans people are biologically and essentially the gender that they present. I also know a few people that would get extremely upset at me using the phrase 'trans people' or 'trans man'. I can't please everyone.

torachan

There's this idea in cissexist society that trans people are naïve about gender. It seems people assume that guys like me "don't know how to be women" and therefore "don't know how to be men" either. Trans people are supposed to be tragically caught in between, too clumsy to conform to either socially sanctioned gender.

[...]

I've talked before about this double bind, in which therapists, doctors, families and friends, along with the media and all the rest of cis society, try to impose very rigid gender roles on trans people, making compliance with these roles a condition for access to hormones and surgeries and then turn around and criticize trans people for our supposedly unenlightened approach to gender. I've even heard people suggest that a good women's studies course could "cure" a trans man of the need to transition, by elucidating all the options he could have as a "different kind of woman." (Retch.)

It's like cis people don't think we've thought about our genders. We have, trust me. In fact, if you're cis and you're reading this, there's a good chance that I have thought more about my gender than you ever have about yours. Much more. We're talking countless hours, endless angsty journal entries, manifold anguished conversations. Hell, I even went to therapy, just for my gender. A lot of us did. (Those who didn't aren't missing much: just another opportunity to be pathologized and forced to justify their own existence.)

The fact is, cis people are generally the ones who are naïve about gender. [...]

The trans community’s marked by violence – so many of us have experienced it, live with it, and so many of us die from it. When we hear that one of us have died, we remember the violence we faced, the threats, the fear we live with.

And yet, whenever a trans person is murdered, the very first thing we trans people have to do is sort through the layers and layers of transphobic misinformation from police, media and families in order to work out who that person was, how they lived their life, what their appropriate pronouns and identifications were.

Because the words are almost always wrong, and almost always an act of erasure. First they will begin by making a reference to assigned sex, as something this person “is” – most commonly, “a man was found in woman’s clothing.” And it’s like, ok it’s certainly possible for it to have been a male crossdresser. We must be cautious and not jump to conclusions, because that would be an act of erasure. And it is after all being reported as a fact by the media. It “makes sense,” because the “knowledge” of the majority always makes sense.

And then they will use an assigned name, a name given to the person at birth. But then, almost always, it will turn out that wait no it was a trans woman. And then we find out that she’d changed her legal name. And had been on hormones. And she was most certainly not known by the name she was assigned at birth to the people in her life. That yes, she was a woman, that she lived and died as a woman, not a “man in women’s clothing.”

But none of that matters to the institutions that create someone’s public memory. Because another reality has intervened – cissexual reality – and how she lived and who she was has disappeared.

Because in all likelihood maybe her real legal name will be put in quotation marks after the false name she discarded – like she was just living some wacky nickname which everyone indulged – and maybe she will be referred to as “a transsexual,” this mystical beast which is somehow not a woman. But she will rarely if ever be described as a transsexual woman by the media, and certainly never as just a plain woman.

the_future_modernes

But there was this lie in the whole thing, and the lie was told by blog after blog, webpage after webpage that talked a great game about how we can be open about sex, but seemed to equate sex with the nude bodies of thin, conventionally attractive, blonde white women in male-gaze centric pornography, as though if I really pushed myself to enjoy such titles as Biker Bitches 5 and clinically lit photoshoots of a woman with her legs in improbably acrobatic positions, I’d be making the world a better place. Because that’s what the world needed, more people to applaud the open display of sculpted bodies as though somehow, that would liberate my fat, pansexual ass from the confines of sexual oppression. As though the ways in which society has pushed at me and pushed at me, telling me to keep my fat ass covered and my queer thoughts to myself is the same as what society tells a 5’8, 110 lbs, straight, white woman with no disabilities. Because it isn’t.

[...]

I looked and looked in those sex positivity blogs and sites, in their pictures and stories and I didn’t find a lot of fat people (male or female), people of color, queer people. I have yet to find a mainstream sex positivity site (yes, this movement has a mainstream) that features transgendered people in all their beauty. Forget seeing disabled people displaying their various modes of sexuality. Forget seeing their bodies displayed as revolutionary and world-changing and an example of how sex is really, really awesome.

I learned soon enough that most sex positivity is actually White Straight Thin Able Cisgendered Cissexual Positivity.

And the world is already positive enough on those traits, thank you very much.

[...]

I’m tired of the lies.

If you’re sex positive and you’re not making an active effort to include and celebrate all kinds of sexuality from all kinds of people? You’re a fucking liar. There it is. You’re a liar.

Because sex positivity and body positivity and anti-racism and fat acceptance and the disability movement and queer positivity and womanism are part of the same thing.

Same with any movement. Fat acceptance? If you’re only showing fat white people or fat able people or fat straight people, then you’re not fat accepting, you’re just white supremacy enforcing and trying to bring chubby people under that umbrella of dominance.

I’m tired of the people who put up some Tumblr blogs and showcase the same old, same old and act like they’re part of a revolution. They’re not. They’re part of making sure that lots of other people know exactly who’s sex is celebrated and who’s isn’t.

So I say FUCK sex positivity. I want sex inclusivity.

ontd_p

The following chart shows some patterns people learn in order to survive in a hierarchical society. Not to conform to expected behavior risks social ostracism, privilege and /or one’s survival. These patterns take place in correspondence to each other; they are tendencies in relationships not personality characteristics.

dagas_isa

The criminal brain has always held a fascination for James Fallon. For nearly 20 years, the neuroscientist at the University of California-Irvine has studied the brains of psychopaths. He studies the biological basis for behavior, and one of his specialties is to try to figure out how a killer's brain differs from yours and mine.

[...]After learning his violent family history, he examined the images and compared them with the brains of psychopaths. His wife's scan was normal. His mother: normal. His siblings: normal. His children: normal.

"And I took a look at my own PET scan and saw something disturbing that I did not talk about," he says.

What he didn't want to reveal was that his orbital cortex looks inactive.

"If you look at the PET scan, I look just like one of those killers."

Fallon cautions that this is a young field. Scientists are just beginning to study this area of the brain — much less the brains of criminals. Still, he says the evidence is accumulating that some people's brains predispose them toward violence and that psychopathic tendencies may be passed down from one generation to another.