MechanizedPossum [she/her]

my gal pal just came across some synthesizer-related issue that’s so weird i can’t even name it without potentially doxxing myself, and the first thing she thought of was asking me about it, and not only could i explain to her what was going on there, but had actually looked into that particular eurorack module doing all that weird shit in the past.

i don’t think i’ve ever felt so understood than when i’m with her, she’s such a treasure and it’s so much fun being weird and gay with her. t4t will save your soul.

Either fart or running away from smth real quick

Its not so much about swearing off religion as it is swearing off idealism which is necessary.

Exactly, and this also means swearing off reddit atheism, which posits a fundamentally idea-driven functioning of hierarchies when it puts the blame for hierarchies on religious dogma.

The Marxist critique of religion has always understood religiosity as a reaction to unbearable material conditions. “Opiate of the masses” means self-medication of pain caused by fundamentally hurtful circumstances, and it is these agonizing circumstances, not the painkillers, that deserve the most attention.

Queer liberation in bourgeois democracies has largely been thanks to grassroots movements that had a big societal impact owed to to queer communities being at the cutting edge of pop culture and queer activism being loud, radical and relentless. These movements until this day struggle against the opposition of well-funded, deeply entrenched, officially endorsed reactionary forces. Due to this materially powerful, hostile forces, advances were often restricted to select legal fields like gay marriage, while areas that have an economic impact like protection from workplace and housing discrimination or encompassing trans healthcare are in many nations lackluster and incomplete until today.

Queer liberation in AES was in many ways the opposite of that, being enacted top-down by decree. There was input by party members from queer communities, by clinical experts ect., but ultimately anything hinged on whether the party wanted to support this cause or not. At the same time, tho, reactionary forces (the churches, activist billionaires) were actively suppressed and did not have any political influence, removing a major factor for state-endorsed and institutional queerphobia.

This lead to drastically different outcomes in practice. In many western countries, queer acceptance among the populace has vastly outpaced our legal (and in many cases where it is relevant) medical acceptance. The people are ahead of the reactionary insitutions here. In many AES countries like Eastern Germany or Czechoslovakian SSR, the institutions were ahead of the people, legalizing homosexuality before western countries did while the public was less accepting of gay people than in the bourgeois states were gay sex was still treated as a crime and fought with police raids on gay bars. A tightly regulated public life led to less cultural impact of queer subculture in many places, with few exceptions like Slovenia (which still under Tito hosted Europe’s first queer film festival and until this day is the most gay-friendly country in Eastern Europe).

These are fundamentally different situations stemming from fundamentally different institutional frameworks for activism. East Germany outpaced West Germany when it came to the legalization of gay sex and the legal recognition of trans people. The “reunification”, or rather: the annexation of the DDR by hostile capitalist and reactionary forces, led to tangible legal setbacks for East German queers - the DDR legalized homosexuality a year earlier and unlike the West, did not retain different ages of consent for gay and straight sex, for example. So when the wall came down, there were suddenly teenage gay couples that were at least in theory threatened with persecution because the West German legal system still operated under the idea that homosexuality spread as a form of social contagion, through seduction of youths by older men. This reactionary and unscientific view lead to a higher age of consent for gay sex until 1994. Trans people were able to change their papers and access treatment on a case by case basis in the DDR, which often led to easier transitions than in the West, were either bottom surgery or sterilization was required until 2011 if you wanted to change your name and gender marker. But East Germany’s public was measurably less accepting of queer people than the public in the west, and outside Berlin is less welcoming to queer people until this day. Where every major West German city had a bustling and open gay nightlife in the early 1970s, East Berlin had its first official gay bar in the late 1980s. Yes, it was a state-run gay bar, i get how cool that sounds, but having a lively, vibrant queer scene requires a kind of organizing that is … difficult if all has to happen within your country’s socialist unity party.

It is overly simplistic to draw statements like “gay people were better off in country x than in country y” from this, such comparisons even today disregard the complexity of the opression we face. How do you rank the fact that Thailand is socially more accepting of trans people than most Western countries, but makes it flat out impossible to have our actual gender legally recognized, meaning that trans women in Thailand routinely and automatically end up in men’s prisons? You can’t put a number on that and say “Thailand ranks as place number so and so on trans rights and Canada ranks as place number so and so.” It doesn’t work. The details aren’t comensurable. And this also goes for comparing gay rights in AES and Western countries.

I know this is a thorny and complicated topic, we’re all used to libs using 1950s soviet laws as an example to hallucinate a supposed inherent homophobia of communism when the UK at the same time chemically castrated Alan Turing and drove him to suicide, or when the US routinely raided gay bars back then and did human experimentation on conversion therapy. It is infuriating how liberals completely memory hole the brutality of our opression in the West due to them having suddenyl forgotten about their own homophobia ten years ago. I hate to see that kind of person act all smug. Fuck that. But let’s not paint a nostalgic and idealized idea of the DDR’s gay bars, this will not enable us to take a Marxist, scientific approach and learn and do better than earlier socialists.

What we see in examples like Cuba can be seen as a learning from other AES states’ history. They did not just pass their new family code, they accompanied it with a widespread agitprop campaign, they ensured that they got the public on board with their plans. And then they backed it up with tangible, material benefits where needed, such as in trans healthcare, were they are training more surgeons than required for the Cuban trans population so they will help trans people from all over LatAm lead a dignified, happy life. And they make sure that queer culture is adequately represented in Havanna’s nightlife, that there’s pride parades etc. This is a good approach under socialism, and it requires a lot of acceptance and openness from the upper ranks of the party to work out.

cinephiles

A more proper term for connoisseurs refined enough to fully appreciate the Œuvre of auteur filmmakers like monsieur Diesél is actually cineáste.

a Freudo-Marxist school that overlapped with the Frankfurt School

The only reason i’m not already smelling the revisionism of that approach is that i just made a very strong and delicious coffee.

Psychology nowadays is an empirical, clinical science that has very little regard for the works of Freud (and Jung as well, who is even more openly esoteric and full of quackery), and i’m glad about them discarding such holdovers. Understanding Freud is still useful in the humanities due to his outsized cultural impact, but that should be understood as an analysis of a deeply unscientific branch of pop culture, not as something that allows you to analyze the workings of the human mind, let alone other people’s mental illnesses. When you understand Marxism as a scientific approach towards economic and political theory that changes and adapts with new evidence, it is advisable to disregard Freud’s writings, as his theories are not replicable, and have a marked tendency to produce a mysogynist, homophobic and transphobic bias that has led to all kinds of stigmatizing, persecutory concepts like paraphilia theory, a general openness to conversion “therapy” and later outcroppings of academic transphobia like the AGP and tr*nsvestitic fetishism discourses. While Freud himself wasn’t outstandingly homophobic for his time and for the psychiatric community back then, he still developed a treatment approach that relies heavily on the therapist enforcing their own biases on their patients, openly encouraging to question and disregard their accounts whenever possible, and this makes Freudian psychotherapy inherently gaslighty and risky for queer, especially trans patients. From first- and especially ample second hand experience within the queer communities i’m active in, i’ve just heard too many accounts of boundary-violating, invalidating and traumatizing sessions. Psychoanalysis is not up to today’s standards of clinical care, and from a philosophocal standpoint is deeply rooted in a universalist liberal idealism, which is inherently at odds with a genuine Marxist approach.

Self-labeling should always be foundational to these things. As queer people, we all come from communities that have a history of having had taxonomy forced upon us, of being treated as specimens labeled by outside authorities for the purpose of control and stigmatization, of having been denied the very ability to express our experiences in our own words, something that continues in the present day with don’t say gay bills and the like, and that makes it so important that we have agency over how we’re referred to.

Turns out that rule is still less widely known then you and me had assumed. The folks i’m talking about aren’t some terfy boomer lesbians, either, they’re all trans and mostly nonbinary themselves, and usually in one or several t4t relationships and actually younger than me. Like, the absolute last people you’d expect that from.

It’s more complex than that shitpost of mine would make you assume, though, i was not being 100% serious there. Some people have a different perspective on this because unlike me, they do not want to be included under the lesbian label. Like, one of the people i had that discussion with is part of a system / plurality with differently gendered personalities making up that system. So if they’d date a lesbian, said lesbian could actually be faced with the situation that the person that is, as they call it, “at the front” at a given moment is one of their male personalities, and that obviously has led them to the understandable conclusion that they can only date bi / pan people, because anybody else would not be able to love all of them. Yes, i know, this already breaks the “non-man” definition, but at that point of the discussion, we hadn’t arrived at bringing that one out.

And in general, that’s really something many people can forget with the non-men loving non-man definition of lesbian, there’s a lot of NB people who do not want to be included under “people a 100% lesbian person is attracted to” because reading them as tomboys or butch women is such a core part of their experiences with misgendering and with having their identity and validity called into doubt. As a nonbinary trans woman, my perspective on this is from fighting for inclusion in the community and being confronted with transphobic and enbiephobic gatekeeping, but a lof of AFAB nonbinary people have good reasons to feel as invalidated when a lesbian is interested in them as i would feel invalidated when a gay man suggests that he could date me, and with their amount of passing being as it is, they get into that kind of situation more than once and that just fucks with people.

Shit’s complicated, because an umbrella term like nonbinary necessarily includes people with experiences and needs that are vastly different from each other.

Fair enough, but in the first example, it’s perfectly understandable why people would be under the assumption that their pronouns would be visibly on display and somebody not using them would purposefully misgender the user. I still remember how in the first days of federation, some guy would accuse us of being Russian bots because his replies had people with he /him, she / her, they / them and comrade / them as pronouns and that amount of “gender diversity” already was so overwhelming to him that his assumption was that we had randomly assigned pronouns for our bot army. The early days of federation weren’t exactly a relaxed time for trans people on this site, we had dunk threads about somebody accusing us all of being fake trans on a fairly regular basis. When your experience with the rest of lemmy are things like that, it’s 100% reasonable to think that somebody using they / them instead of she / her is doing that on purpose and not due to simple technical difficulties. How much benefit of the doubt are you demanding from people in a situation like that? I’m not saying that this isn’t something that causes avoidable confrontations and can be a bad look, but i am definitely arguing that it’s unfair to blame trans people in that situation for lashing out. Hurt people act mean, it is how it is. When you want our community to act more agreeable, you first need to provide an environment that doesn’t constantly shit on them, simple as.

And don’t even get me started on the cesspool that’s reddit. Being thin-skinned and prone to jump to conclusions is a state of mind that site just gets you into as a trans person, i doubt i have to tell you that. It’s part of why i do not use it anymore, reddit had actual “i have to talk to my therapist about this” consequences on my mental health and i didn’t even wade that far outside of the trans boards after coming out. I’m not kidding, back then i was forced to attend gender counceling as part of the medical gatekeeping for gender affirming care in my country and talking about reddit-induced detorioration of my mental health was one of the few actual uses i got out of that. Turns out i also wasn’t alone with these problems, either (although my therapist had the most problem with trans 4chan users in her practice for fairly obvious reasons). Being too online in a chronically lowkey invalidating environment really, really fucks with people even before we account for the outright hostility, the targeted harassment, the chasers creeping into our DMs or the people falsely reporting us for suicide risks. And logging off is something a lot of us have to actively work on due to these sites being literally designed to habituate you and keep you permanently online. It’s honestly kinda mean to call it “ridiculous” when trans people in an environment like that overreact to something that, while unintended, is still objectively very hurtful from that person’s perspective. I mean, yes, i agree, it’s an overreaction, it is uncalled for from the other person’s perspective, but come on. We both know how people get into such a headspace, and honestly, it’s not the trans person’s fault.

The problem here is that they / them is only generic to people who speak English as a first language. In my first language, it’s a neopronoun, one that you’ll see being used if you know a lot of nonbinary people, but that’s a good deal less common than several local neopronouns. And none of these neopronouns are so common that they would come off as gender neutral, all of them will come off as “i’m assuming that person has some heavy gender thing going on”. Now, that’s something that literally goes for almost everybody i hang out with, but still, none of all the genderdiverse people i know use a gender neutral default pronoun for others, not even the majority that at least sometimes uses neopronouns for themselves, not even the ones that are the most into gender abolition.

It’s just not a thing we do around here, firstly because neopronouns are so personal and specific here, secondly because our neutral option is “none / use name”. And when we don’t know the name, we use neutral descriptors like “that person.” And that option works just as well in English, so i seriously encourage making more use of it when we’re still in a phase were all of this is in flux.

Yeah, that’s definitely the impression i’d be getting in that situation, but that situation isn’t exactly ideal to begin with. I know that there’s edge cases like people who are questioning or closeted, which make practices like pronoun circles tricky for those people because that either forces a premature outing or a self-misgendering on someone. There’s really no ideal solution that will cover all cases. But as a rule of thumb, i think we should just normalize stating your pronouns without making that something that feels coercive, and if that falls flat for some reason, i prefer pronoun avoidance over they / them, because that actually is a neutral option.

If you know somebody’s pronouns, using these pronouns and nothing else isn’t “better”, it’s the only correct option.

Anyone who says this practice is transphobic is just being ridiculous

Who is saying that, tho? From my experience, the issue is always brought up when people use they / them in a context where they know it’s misgendering somebody. And when i see that or when i’m bringing this up myself, the initial complaint is never “you’re being a transphobe here”, the complaint is always just “this person is using she / her and not they / them, can you please correct your post?” Unintentional misgendering is still misgendering and should always be corrected, even if you know the misgendered person is never going to see it. And if the misgendering was a perfectly understandable accident or not doesn’t matter, either. When i know somebody’s pronouns and see that they’re not being used, i will bring that up. But why would i call people transphobes at that point, like who even does that?

Accusations of transphobia only enter the picture when people are being dicks about this. Which, unfortunately, happens a lot. Some people just prefer to enter full debate dingdong mode until they get banned instead of just hitting the edit button, correcting a mistake that can and does happen to everyody and saying sorry. Unfortunately, i’ve been part of such discussions on a fairly regular basis. And honestly, when people place their insistence that they cannot make a mistake towards a trans person over treating that person with respect, yeah, that reeks of transphobia to me, there’s no way around that. That’s just a cis person telling us when we’re allowed to be offended and when we’re supposed to stay quiet and remember where our place is.

That’s all there is to this and i’ve literally not once seen somebody say that they / them for unspecified people, for groups, for people you can’t know the pronouns of would be transphobic. And i’m saying this as somebody who is a hardliner on this question and thinks it’s reasonable to either avoid pronouns entirely or to have people look up pronouns before writing about somebody. But that’s just my highly subjective opinion about which ways to adress somebody we perceive to be the most inclusive. Gender neutral language by necessity is a part of that, but so is gender affirming language.

I’m really, really glad to hear this! It means a lot that i could help.

i thought this would trigger the whataboutism bot, kinda disappointed ngl

She did a hecking whataboutismerino!

Also, I refuse to detransition. I’d rather die. Hands down.

I feel you, i wasn’t suggesting that, either. Just saying that constantly pushing forward isn’t something that should be expected of trans people.

I also get the doubt and how that fucks with you pre-surgery. Like, i know i need to get something done every time i have sex, and 90% of the time when i look at my junk it’s “wtf even is that stuff”, but i still worry if it’s the right decision from time to time even though it’s super fucking obvious that yes, yes it is the right decision. I think that’s normal, just as it’s definitely normal to feel like a fake trans person even though you’re very obviously not fake, i hear that all the time from people who are very clearly super mega trans 3000.

🦐 is missing from this picture

otherwise it is highly accurate