Ramble On, Amazon

pustluk:

Serious posts aren’t really my bag anymore and, like, reactionaries labeling trans women some kind of rape risk isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, but something that’s really evil is when that rhetoric is coupled with a push for carcerality, as if that somehow legitimates it.

I’ve written about this before, but I want to distill how to overwrite that kind of propaganda and fear-mongering with, like, Actual Facts into one post. These are the two most common lies you’ll hear, as well as how to expose them:

”A 2017 study by Fair Play for Women found that 41% of incarcerated trans women are sex offenders.”

• Fair Play for Women has an explicitly anti-trans agenda. Any research from them is fundamentally biased.
• The so-called ‘study’ was timed as propaganda against amending the 2004 Gender Recognition Act to remove psychiatric clearance as a requirement for changing gender markers.
• The ‘study’ falsified the number of incarcerated trans women. They claim there are 113 trans women incarcerated in England and Wales–the only official report from the Ministry of Justice, however, says there are only 70 prisoners of any trans identity.
• FPfW claimed to have independently ‘identified’ incarcerated trans women from prison reports. No such records exist, and FPfW did not explain what criteria they used.
• There are no reports breaking down the types of offenses committed for which trans women are incarcerated. Even FPfW acknowledges this.
• Their evaluation is based on the assumption that all inmates of eight prisons are sex offenders. This is false. Only five of the eight house sex offenders, and most of the prisons also house vulnerable prisoners in mixed units.
• Many kinds of sex work are criminalized as ‘sex offenses’ in England and Wales. Even if trans women are convicted for sex offenses at higher rates than cis women, that doesn’t imply sexual violence.

“The 2011 Swedish study found that trans women exhibit a ‘male pattern of criminality’, proving they’re a rape risk!”

• The study is divided into two cohorts, from 1973-1988 and 1989-2003. The so called ‘male pattern’ disappears completely in the more recent cohort.
  
• Cecilia Dhejne, primary author of the study, is on record with Trans Advocate clarifying this is not in any way what their results suggest and expressing extreme frustration at the way her research has been misrepresented.
• Again, there has been no review of criminalized behaviors for which trans women are incarcerated.
• Dhejne believes conviction rates among trans women reflect criminalized behaviors associated with marginality and poverty—including sex work—not sexual assaults against cis women and girls.
• Trans women are already parsed as men by the carceral system. This is why they’re often sent to men’s prisons, where they experience horrific physical and sexual abuse by guards and other incarcerated people.
• Other women, for comparison, are often given a pardon for sexual abuse. Case in point, current US legal precedent–set in 1993 by Hermesmann v. Seyer–is that non-trans women are entitled to child support from victims of statutory rape.

More generally, ‘criminality’ is a morally bankrupt metric to begin with. It’s not a metric of crimes committed–only of conviction rates, which reflect marginality, not the moral character of incarcerated people and certainly not ‘criminal predisposition’. Reliance on a carceral system that exists solely to uphold systemic oppression is sexist, classist, homophobic, and above all disgustingly racist.

We can’t allow lies and propaganda like this to be circulated, certainly not now that the Trump administration has effectively declared open season on trans women. Especially if you aren’t a trans woman yourself, it’s your responsibility to engage with reactionaries on our behalf whenever you see this rhetoric being disseminated or even just espoused by anyone in your community.

(via lady-feral)

postcardsfromspace:

shiralipkin:

inaneenglish:

valeria2067:

scribbleboxfox:

theunacceptablepylades:

iamtehzuul:

princessofharte:

ryuuenx:

key–of–destiny:

impureimpulse:

floridagothic:

Here is a list of random facts about Florida that prove exactly how weird of a place it is without the news stories.

In the north west there is a waterfall. The water falls from a stream for 90ft into a sink hole and disappears into the earth.

The capital of the state is filled with ancient live oaks and every spring the city turns yellow with pollen. The pollen is like a plague on the population. Even people without allergies develops allergies living there.

You’ll be floating down a river in a boat or on an inner tube when you see something fall from a tree ten feet away from you. You scramble out of the water as you see that the what you thought was a limb is now a water moccasin swimming past you.

Extensive systems of tunnels fill the landscape. They’re the hard work of the gopher tortoise. You know to never reach into one of these gopher tortoise borrows. They’re filled with rattlesnakes.

The largest native snake in Florida can reach lengths of about six or seven feet long. It is appropriately named the indigo snake for the blue sheen its black scales. Have no fear though. It is non venomous. Despite this fact, it’s diet includes rattlesnakes.

In the south, two invasive species of snakes are cross breeding to form an aggressive giant. This monstrosity will even feast on alligators.

There is a forest surrounding a spring populated with monkeys. The monkeys are not native to the state or the region. They were brought here as an attraction and left on a small island in the middle of a river. No one realized they could swim.

There are dozens of places claimed to be fountains of youth located throughout the state. One is in the north east in the oldest city in the state. It’s also the oldest European city in the country.

Ancient fish populate the rivers throughout the state. They can reach sizes of up to 10 ft in length and weigh over 300lbs. They’re jaws are like that of an alligator.

The cypress trees turn the water tannic and black. The water is so opaque you can’t see but six inches deep.

I never knew the USA had a mini Australia of its own.

@ryuuenx

MINI AUSTRALIA OH MY GOD

Bull sharks swim in our springs sometimes. They’re the only shark that can tolerate fresh water.

Twice a year, black “love bugs” come out from wherever they’re hiding and do nothing but mate. They look like catdog with how they walk. Their dead guts mess up car paint worse than bird poop.

Hurricanes, water spouts, and tornados are pretty common.

There are projectors in every classroom because when Jeb Bush was our governor, he wanted everyone in the state to be taught by one teacher per subject.

There’s at least one strawberry festival every month, but the best ones are in March. There are at least two manatee festivals a year.

Most of the animals from one of the Tarzan live action movies live in the state, usually at state parks. The hippopotamus is named Lucifer and he is a legal Florida resident. He likes watermelons.

There’s no way to live in Florida without the outside becoming the inside. There’s nothing you can do about it. Spiders and palmetto bugs will get inside no matter how much you spray or what pest company you use. Frogs and lizards will appear in your bed and bathtubs with no explanation. Snakes will somehow make it 200ft into a company building through 3 locked doors. It’s a mystery.

Walking to your car every morning with an arm raised cautiously in front of you as you go. No it’s not a Nazi salute, you’re preparing to walk through unexpected spider webs. The one day you don’t do it is the day you walk into one. That web is easily 6 feet in circumference.

Praying for the day the city finally starts spraying for mosquitoes.

Being that poor asshole that lives in the county where they don’t have a budget to spray for mosquitoes.

FUCKING GREY SQUIRRELS

Driving 45 minutes to an hour one way for work is pretty common. Driving 2 hours one way is not unheard of.

Pretty sure it’s impossible to be more than an hour and a half away from the coast.

It’s actually 91 degree F outside, feels like 110, and you’re wearing a sweater in your clerical office because they set the A/C to 68. Condensation on building windows is a common occurrence in the summer.

Long-term residents genuinely do not give two fucks about a hurricane unless it’s a category four. Three-hour afternoon squalls can do more damage than a category two. You can drive through a category one and not even realize you’re under an alert until you see the news the next morning.

That feel when you’re new to Florida and driving through an afternoon rainstorm for the first time, and the wipers are on high, you’re doing 20 mph, and you still can’t see.

That feel when you’re a long-term resident and some friends from out west come visit and comment on how dark the sky is, and you’re like bitch, that’s barely gray, does your sky never actually turn black during a rainstorm? There are literally storms that roll through that make it feel like night has fallen at 11 in the morning, it’s terrifying when you’re not used to it.

Seriously everyone in Florida is pretty immune to the idea of death, we walk past it constantly

Of the top 30 cities in the US with the most lightning, Florida has 17 of them.

Florida loves food festivals. In addition to the above mentioned strawberry festival, there’s also multiple seafood festivals, a peanut festival, giant shiitake mushroom festival, several chocolate festivals, a kumquat festival, a zucchini festival, and festivals for corn, honey, wine, swamp cabbage, sour oranges, pumpkins, tomatoes, catfish, pigs, watermelon, oysters, grapes, flan and a hell of a lot more.

Did I mention palmetto bugs are 2 inch roaches that can fly

@ghostzzy

what the fuck

95% of the state’s wildlife winds up in your pool. With or without a screen around it.

Alligators in pretty much every body of water.

The part of the hurricane where the wall has just passed over you and everything’s too still and too quiet.

They taught us the pattern differences between a coral snake and a king snake because there was a chance we might run into one.

The ten thousand invasive species that have accumulated over time. There’s a new one each month.

Cane toads.

There are palm trees everywhere. Florida is an arboreal disaster. So many different types of trees. So many that kill each other. It’s a goddamned massacre.

The sweet smell of the sugar cane fields when they burn them.

Armadillos. Fucking- Armadillos.

My home. I’ve experienced at least half of the things in this list one or more times in just the past ten days.

P.S. Armadillos (when alive and not squished to a pancake on the highway) are actually pretty cute, BUT they will burrow out huge tunnels directly under your home’s foundation that can cause structural damage.

Oh, and they also carry leprosy.

BTW: Did we mention sinkholes?

O_O my boss is sending me to Florida for a week to train for a new role in our department. WHAT am I walking into?

Don’t forget the iguanas! Iguanas were a trendy pet a while ago before people realized that they would keep growing and that you need to devote half of a room in your house to being an iguana habitat eventually, so they released them into the wild, and now five-foot-long iguanas move in massive herds along the canals.

Also it often rains on one side of a street and not the other. Like, a sheet of rain in the middle of the road, with a downpour on one side and bright clear skies on the other.

Being late getting home from school because there was an alligator hanging out by the bus pick-up.

FIRE ANTS. HOW HAS NO ONE MENTIONED FIRE ANTS?

Finding mummified lizards on windowsills. 

Wearing anoles as earrings by getting them to bite your earlobes as a weirdly ubiquitous childhood experience.

Exotic birds who escape from roadside attractions and poorly run “zoos,” breed, and hang out in people’s yards.

BANANA SPIDERS. SWEET JESUS.

Native Florida plants are mostly scrub, but everyone landscapes with invasive shit like palm trees, and they get WRECKED by storms. Streets lined with topless palm trees never really stop being funny.

Literally everything about the state government and everyone ever elected to it.

No but seriously: Banana spiders can be SIX INCHES across and have freakin’ SKULLS on their backs! Their webs can be eight feet across!

School is never cancelled for snow, but sometimes it’s canceled because a huge friggin’ hole opens up out of nowhere and SWALLOWS part of it!

Disney World is no big deal. Florida literally sucks the magic out of the Magic Kingdom

There are cows everywhere. No one knows who they belong to. Maybe they are yours?

Before a hurricane, the ocean just says “nope” and GTFOs

Feral. Orange. Trees.

(via postcardsfromspace)

rivergst:

casper-the-friendly-being:

toooldforthissh–stuff:

shatterpath:

hedwig-dordt:

drst:

gehayi:

galacticdrift:

spikesjojo:

1. Open a bank account or get a credit card without signed permission from her father or hr husband.
2. Serve on a jury - because it might inconvenience the family not to have the woman at home being her husband’s helpmate.
3. Obtain any form of birth control without her husband’s permission. You had to be married, and your hub and had to agree to postpone having children.
4. Get an Ivy League education. Ivy League schools were men’s colleges ntil the 70′s and 80′s. When they opened their doors to women it was agree that women went there for their MRS. Degee.
5. Experience equality in the workplace: Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative professional positions.
   
6. Keep her job if she was pregnant.Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women were regularly fired from their workplace for being pregnant.
7. Refuse to have sex with her husband.The mid 70s saw most states recognize marital rape and in 1993 it became criminalized in all 50 states. Nevertheless, marital rape is still often treated differently to other forms of rape in some states even today.
   
8. Get a divorce with some degree of ease.Before the No Fault Divorce law in 1969, spouses had to show the faults of the other party, such as adultery, and could easily be overturned by recrimination.
9. Have a legal abortion in most states.The Roe v. Wade case in 1973 protected a woman’s right to abortion until viability.
10. Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment. According to The Week, the first time a court recognized office sexual harassment as grounds for legal action was in 1977.
11. Play college sports Title IX of the  Education Amendments of protects people from discrimination  based on sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal financial  assistance It was nt until this statute that colleges had teams for women’s sports
12. Apply for men’s Jobs   The EEOC rules that sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal.  This ruling is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men.

This is why we needed feminism - this is why we know that feminism works

I just want to reiterate this stuff, because I legit get the feeling there are a lot of younger women for whom it hasn’t really sunk in what it is today’s GOP is actively trying to return to.

Did you go to a good college? Shame on you, you took a college placement that could have gone to a man who deserves and needs it to support or prepare for his wife & children. But if you really must attend college, well, some men like that, you can still get married if you focus on finding the right man.

Got a job? Why? A man could be doing that job. You should be at home caring for a family. You shouldn’t be taking that job away from a man who needs it (see college, above). You definitely don’t have a career – you’ll be pregnant and raising children soon, so no need to worry about promoting you.

This shit was within living memory.  I’M A MILLENIAL and my mother was in the second class that allowed women at an Ivy League school. Men who are alive today either personally remember shit like this or have parents/family who have raised them into thinking this was the way America functioned back in the blissful Good Old Days. There are literally dudes in the GOP old enough to remember when it was like this and yearn for those days to return.

When people talk about resisting conservativism and the GOP, we’re not just talking about whether the wage gap is a myth or not. We’re talking about whether women even have the fundamental right to exist as individuals, to run their own households and compete for jobs and be considered on an equal footing with men in any arena at all in the first place.

I was a child in the 1960s, a teenager in the 1970s, a young adult in the 1980s.
This is what it was like:

When I was growing up, it was considered unfortunate if a girl was good at sports. Girls were not allowed in Little League. Girls’ teams didn’t exist in high school, except at all-girls’ high schools. Boys played sports, and girls were the cheerleaders.

People used to ask me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone told me it was impossible–those just weren’t realistic goals for a girl–the latter, especially, because you couldn’t trust women to judge fairly and rationally, after all.

In the 1960s and 1970s, all women were identified by their marital status, even in arrest reports and obituaries. In elementary school, my science teacher referred to Pierre Curie as DOCTOR Curie and Marie Curie as MRS. Curie…because, as he put it, “she was just his wife.” (Both had doctorates and both were Nobel prize winners, so you would think that both would be accorded respect.)

Companies could and did require women to wear dresses and skirts. Failure to do could and did get women fired. And it was legal. It was also legal to fire women for getting married or getting pregnant. The rationale was that a woman who was married or who had a child had no business working; that was what her husband was for. Aetna Insurance, the biggest insurance company in America, fired women for all of the above.

A man could rape his wife. Legally. I can remember being twelve years old and reading about legal experts actually debating whether or not a man could actually be said to coerce his wife into having sex. This was a serious debate in 1974.

The debate about marital rape came up in my law school, too, in 1984. Could a woman be raped by her husband? The guys all said no–a woman got married, so she was consenting to sex at all times. So I turned it around. I asked them if, since a man had gotten married, that meant that his wife could shove a dildo or a stick or something up his ass any time she wanted to for HER sexual pleasure.

(Hey, I thought it was reasonable. If one gender was legally entitled to force sex on the other, then obviously the reverse should also be true.)

The male law students didn’t like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman.

My reaction was, “Thank you for proving my point…”

The concept of date rape, when first proposed, was considered laughable. If a woman went out on a date, the argument of legal experts ran, sexual consent was implied. Even more sickening was the fact that in some states–even in the early 1980s–a man could rape his daughter…and it was no worse than a misdemeanor.

Women taking self-defense classes in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently described in books and on TV as “cute.” The implication was that it was absurd for a woman to attempt to defend herself, but wasn’t it just adorable for her to try?

I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high school–1978-79 and 1979-80–because, as the principal told me, “Only boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you won’t use it.”

When I was in college–from 1980 to 1984–there were no womens’ studies. The idea hadn’t occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professor–a man who had a doctorate in history–informed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist because…wait for it…womens’ brains were too small.

(He was very surprised when I came up with a list of fifty women gifted in the arts and science, most of whom he had never heard of before.)

When Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate in 1984, the press hailed it as a disaster. What would happen, they asked fearfully, if Mondale died and Ferraro became president? What if an international crisis arose and she was menstruating? She could push the nuclear button in a fit of PMS! It would be the end of the WORLD!!

…No, they WEREN’T kidding.

On the surface, things are very different now than they were when I was a child, a teen and a young adult. But I’m afraid that people now do not realize what it was like then. I’ve read a lot of posts from young women who say that they are not feminists. If the only exposure to feminism they have is the work of extremists, I cannot blame them overmuch.

I wish that I could tell them what feminism was like when it was new–when the dream of legal equality was just a dream, and hadn’t even begun to come true. When “woman’s work” was a sneer–and an overt putdown. When people tut-tutted over bright and athletic girls with the words, “Really, it’s a shame she’s not a boy.” That lack of feminism wasn’t all men opening doors and picking up checks. A lot of it was an attitude of patronizing contempt that hasn’t entirely died out, but which has become less publicly acceptable.

I wish I could make them feel what it was like…when grown men were called “men” and grown women were “girls.”

Know your history.

So this, too, is what they mean saying “make America great again” and/or the good old days.

REBLOG FOREVER.

I am 70. I remember all those things. I was a student nurse from 64 to 67 and we were not permitted to “finish” a bed bath on a male or insert a catheter in a male. Seeing male genitals might cause us “harm” or upset our delicate sensibilities. Imagine when we graduated and were “thrown” to the wolves. Imagine if you were a male patient who had to be the first to be “practiced” on by a graduate nurse. (Ha!) At the school I attended no student nurse could be married. Only one school in my city (Atlanta) would even admit married women and Male Nurses weren’t even thought of. What man would want to be a nurse when he could be a Doctor. In all my training I only remember 3 or 4 Women who were Doctor’s and a very few, (less than 5 or 6) female interns or residents (and this was a teaching hospital) and most of those were OB/Gyns and one was a pediatrician.

When I graduated and was going to get married I wanted to go on birth control pills. You needed to be on them for a least one cycle before they were effective. I won’t go into what hoops I had to jump through to get a prescription from my Dr. (a man, natch) but when i went to the drug store to get the prescription filled I ended up having to get my future husband to “accompany” me so the pharmacist “interview” him and see if it was okay with him for me to be on the pill.

Even when we went to get a marriage license I had to get my Father’s signature and we had to go before a Judge because I was not yet 21 (I was 20 and 9 months).

I could go on and on, getting a credit card in MY name, etc., but I will tell you that WE MUST RESIST.

The number of people I know who romanticize gender inequality is frankly terrifying. A world never existed in which the lives of women were simplified by benevolent men who saw to her every want and need. That was not a thing. A world never existed in which women were all ladies, men were all gentlemen, & everything was some great big cishet fairytale. Feminists aren’t a bunch of upstarts who want to destroy a perfectly wholesome and non-harmful system. Just…look at history. Look at the posts above.

We. Must. Resist..

About 8: The State of New York only added No-Fault Divorce as an option in 2010 (!!!)

(via lady-feral)

postcardsfromspace:

postcardsfromspace:

HB2796 is an absolutely blatant attempt to strip away the civil rights of transgender people; and it’s absolutely fucking terrifying.

Quoting the official summary of HB2796:

This bill prohibits the word “sex” or “gender” from being interpreted to mean “gender identity,” and requires “man” or “woman” to be interpreted to refer exclusively to a person’s genetic sex, for purposes determining the meaning of federal civil rights laws or related federal administrative agency regulations or guidance. No federal civil rights law shall be interpreted to treat gender identity or transgender status as a protected class, unless it expressly designates “gender identity” or “transgender status” as a protected class.

HB2796 is currently with the Republican-majority House Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice. Please, PLEASE–especially if you’re cisgender, and doubly if you’re one of their constituents–call the Representatives on the committee and explain just how much damage this will do, how many lives it will destroy, and how many legislative careers (hopefully) hinge on its passage or failure.

Committee members are:

• Chairman Steve King (R-IA-04; King is also one of HB2796′s sponsors) - (202) 225-4426
  
• Vice Chairman Ron DeSantis (R-FL-06) - (202) 225-2706
  
• Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ-08; Franks is also one of HB2796’s sponsors) - (202) 225-4576
  
• Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX-01) - (202) 225-3035
  
• Rep. Karen Handel (R-GA-06) - (202) 225-4501
  
• Ranking Member Steve Cohen (D-TN-09) - (202) 225-3265
  
• Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD-08) - (202) 225-5341
  
• Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY-10) - (202) 225-5635
  

(Note - Listed phone numbers are for DC offices only, but links go to pages with both district and federal office information, as well as additional avenues of contact.)

Once more for the weekday / West coast crowd.

OP back, with a few additional notes:

If you’re not getting answers at the numbers listed above, the representatives’ names link to info on additional ways to contact them.

Contact your own representatives, too, and make sure they’re aware of the bill and that it’s important to their constituents.

On one hand: yeah, this is probably junk legislation. Handel attempted to pass a similar amendment to the military appropriations bill and failed, then immediately introduced HB2796 in response. On the other hand: With the current political climate and an administration that gives no shits about constitutional rights, I’m not willing to gamble on that; and furthermore, it’s a goddamn unconscionable piece of legislation whether or not it’s expected to pass.

Let your elected representatives know that trans lives and dignity matter to American voters. Please.

(via postcardsfromspace)