Let's be clear that the Tory and Labour governments:-
(a) Committed (largely based on lies as to what it would entail) to not making it easier for trans people to update their ID (and quashed Scottish attempts to do so).
(b) Required ID to vote.
(c) Will shortly require ID to participate in public conversation.
This is fundamentally anti-democratic.
The problem with AI companies running out of other people's money is that Margaret Thatcher isn't alive to have her nose rubbed in it.
How rejection letters should look.
It's not just that TERFism is middle-class; it's that TERFism plays on class anxieties in a way that is straight out of the Nazi playbook.
How else do you explain someone who earns as much in an hour or two as the average person in the UK earns in a year being described as a "working class hero" while the people who earn just 60% of what the average person earns are described as the "bourgeois elite"?
Trans women are at an extremely high risk of poverty and FWS and the Supreme Court decided that addressing that inequality was illegal. There's no excuse.
You need to choose your issues and not let anyone tell you something else is more important. Maybe it is more important but that doesn't actually matter.
Firstly, we have lots of problems and solving just one of them, even the most important one, will barely improve our situation.
Secondly, if you don't have the humility to understand that other people may be better able to address other issues, or the trust that other people will, you might be a narcissist, and narcissists tend to be actively harmful to improving things.
A country that requires ID (which is not easily available to everyone) to not only vote, as the Tories introduced, but to even participate in public conversation, as Labour are introducing, is not a democracy.
This government has:-
They keep pretending they're "protecting children," but through their actions it's obvious their priority is protecting abusers, and they will violate human rights to do it.
Hearing that someone I respect is a feminist should not cause fear.
To clarify, knowing that someone I respect is a feminist does not cause fear, but hearing that someone I respect is a feminist triggers the "oh, great, now I have to try and figure out whether that's true or whether they're just claiming the badge as a kind of self-congratulation in order to distract from their odious politics."
It's very tempting to blame JK Rowling for that, and for sure she is the most prominent example of it right now, but I think it's to some extent always been true.
Shout out to the humiliating incompetence of the BBC, who routinely fail to recognise any kind of agenda in our bullies saying they are not our bullies.
Special fuck you, too, to Jesse Singal, who accuses trans people of "motivated reasoning" but doesn't think his attempts to spin the narrative in such a way that exonerates himself of the harm he's caused could possibly be subject to motivated reasoning.
It's wild that experts in trans care are called 'biased' because they know what they're talking about, but when the mental health outcomes of that care are called into question by the exact people harming trans people's mental health, there is presumed to be absolutely no bias there.
"Oh they must be having mental health proiblems because the care doesn't work; it can't possibly be because I'm a massive bully persecuting a marginalised minority, that's completely unthinkable."
This is the world we live in. It's so fucked.
In promoting the Arcadion LP, Square Enix described Tom Morello as "critically acclaimed".
I mean it's not a lie but also that term has particular connotations in the context of FFXIV.
I think as trans people we are acutely aware that our enemy is patriarchy.
But the people openly defending patriarchy, while our enemies, are less upsetting than the people who pretend their defence of patriarchy is actually somehow feminism.
Weakening feminism by capitulating to patriarchy, and allowing patriarchal institutions to declare that's what feminism is, JK Rowling is a betrayer of women.
You should notice, also, that when feminists are suspicious of cis men, they cite statistics of how most sexual assaults are perpetrated by cis men. When anti-trans activists are suspicious of trans women, they cite examples of sexual assaults perpetrated by trans women.
There is a qualitative difference between saying "if most sexual assaults are perpetrated by cis men, then we need to be careful about cis men" and saying "if one trans woman is a rapist, all trans women are rapists."
The latter is not only the logical fallacy of hasty generalisation, it is also an example of fungibility: treating trans women as interchangeable. That is an aspect of objectification, which is distinctly anti-feminist.
I've actually personally had anti-trans activists try to tell me that objection to treating people like objects is "the wrong kind of feminism."
"I know facts don't care about my feelings, but you are not a fact. You are (allegedly) a person, and the word for a person who doesn't care about people's feelings is 'sociopath'."
As I've said before, cis men are around 80% less likely to be sexually assaulted than cis women, while trans women are around 50% more likely to be sexually assaulted than cis women.
Anti-trans activism consists of the proposition that yelling 'biology' loudly enough will make that fact go away. Instead of addressing the vulnerability of trans women, just call them men and pretend that vulnerability doesn't exist.
The mental gymnastics involved in anti-trans activists purporting to oppose rape while being dismissive of rape when it comes to the 'undesirables' is not remotely reasonable, and yet underpins the lion's share of anti-trans legislation.
This only makes sense if one thinks rape is a suitable punishment for being trans, which is a crime against humanity. Transphobes need to go to prison over this.
It's not surprising they're going after autistic people. The natural enemy of the autistic is the psychopath, and anti-trans and anti-migrant fearmongering as well as LLM bullshit is all part of a process of normalising and empowering psychopaths.
I remember, ten years ago, total waste of organic matter and developer of DirectX Alex St. John bragging about hiring undiagnosed autistic people because they're easier to exploit.
The 'scrounger' rhetoric is entirely backwards, promulgated by entitled shitsmears who want to prey on those who have difficulty asserting their own value, and who see greater understanding and solidarity about autism as a barrier to that.
TERFs AI bros
🤝
Putting unlikely hypothetical harms ahead of harms actually happening in real life because the harms actually happening in real life make them look like the baddies.
Trans girls: *sitting around talking about dating and relationships*
JK Rowling: WHY ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT RAPE!
Trans girls: We aren't, we're talking about-
JK Rowling: RAPE! RAPE RAPE RAPEY RAPE!
Trans girls: ...
JK Rowling: Also why don't you date each other? STOP MAKING OUT AND ANSWER ME!
It's definitely worth saying that false accusations of rape are rare, but I feel uncomfortable about stopping there.Because if you just stop there, you get to ignore the fact that Black men in the United States are three and a half times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of sexual assault than white men. It's no news to Black people that prejudice pervades the justice system even though it's "not supposed to."
Shifting the focus away from Black men in the US, I don't know if any of the trans women in the UK have been wrongfully convicted. But the "trans women are rapists" drum that certain fascists keep irresponsibly bashing certainly does introduce that as a risk factor.
What I am nearly certain about is that trans women are more likely to be convicted (wrongfully or not) than cis men. In 2024 less than 3% of rapes reported to police in England and Wales resulted in a charge. I'd bet anything the number of trans women convicted is far higher than 3% of those accused.
Remember when the Economist posted that headline: "Should trans people be sterilised?"
I didn't read the article because the real answer doesn't require an article: "No, because that would be a crime against humanity under article 7, paragraph 1(g) of the Rome Statute (1997) of the International Criminal Court, which is codified in British law under the International Criminal Court Act (2001)."
But of course, the people who keep proposing crimes against humanity are "reasonable" and the people saying "please don't do a crime against humanity on me" are "going too far."