I for one welcome our new robot comrades
Human intelligence was already artificial. Communists should embrace our cyborg comrades under a framework of neurodiversity, disibality justice, and Marxist feminism.
Uncountably Queer: Notes on the geometry of gender
Neither… nor… nor… can be generative if we let it. If we ever discovered the One True gender taxonomy, there would immediately be people identifying outside of it. That’s a good thing, that’s just proof we ave agency. Genders are being created, we’re not just uncovering something that’s already there. Let’s embrace it.
Ambivalent women don’t have to turn TERF
TERFs aren’t wrong to say that sex is material and that womanhood is a political class. Where the TERF analysis goes wrong is in where it locates the boundaries of that class. There is no singular, universal experience of what it means to be a woman – for any biological criterion TERFs put forth, there will be some cis women who don’t meet it. For every social experience of marginalization that has a gendered component to it, there are some cis women who do not experience it. The common thread in defining woman-as-a-class is not any essential quality – it’s the inherently social and political act of identifying with that class, and therefore being seen (at least intermittently) as part of that class.
Against Bipartisanship: The Three Kinds of Swing Voters
There are three major parties in U.S. politics: Democrat, Republican, and None-Of-The-Above (e.g. not voting). So really there are three types of swing voters: N-D swing voters (left of democrat), D-R swing voters (“moderates”), and R-N swing voters (right of republican). In competitive races, the None-Of-The-Above voters are the ones who see Democrats and Republicans as so similar — and unpalatable — that it isn’t worth jumping through the hoops necessary to vote for one or the other.
The far right has achieved its electoral success through a combination of making it harder for N-D swing voters to vote, and mobilizing R-N swing voters with more and more extreme right wing Republican candidates. Sure, a few D-R swing voters swung D in this election. Those are the swing voters the far right could afford to lose, for the sake of mobilizing the R-N swing voters. So the Democratic Party’s strategy of compromising with moderates at the expense of the base (the margins), is a losing strategy.
Why TERFs love “we should all use they/them”
This is what Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism looks like (as opposed to Feminist-Appropriating Radical Transphobes): It uses all the Right language. It’s academic. It’s self-consciously feminist; you might even call it radically so. And, it excludes trans women. Yes – referring to women as she/her puts emphasis on our gender identities. It makes gender salient in everyday interactions. For people who know we could use “they” and choose to use “she/her” anyway, that is the whole point. We need to be scouring our own beliefs to ensure that we know why TERF ideology is wrong, and how what we believe is meaningfully different.
A Sapphic TDoV Affirmation
Trans women are women
Trans lesbians are lesbians
#TransDykesAreGoodAndPure
Trans isn’t a gender and transphobia isn’t a sexual orientation.
If you’d date a cis woman but wouldn’t ever date a trans woman, that’s not because you’re a lesbian that’s because you’re transphobic.
If you date cis women and trans women, those are the same gender so that doesn’t make you bi.
Lesbianism will not be obsolete as long as there are trans lesbians.
Gender Isn’t Ternary Either
Within the queer/trans community, we have no shortage of genders. But to the outside world, the frontier of trans inclusivity is all about pronouns. Facebook now recoginzes three genders: she/her, he/him, and they/them.
It is anachronistic at best to apply the label “cisgender” retroactively to people who were historically considered (or self-identified as) transgender. When our present-day ternary is applied in full, and every queer in history branded neatly as either “cis” or “trans”, it becomes violent: When we erase the self-identities of historical gender deviants, we not only misgender them, but we deprive each other of access to complex histories that cisheteropatriarchy has already worked hard to erase.
Who got left out in the rain when we closed the transgender umbrella, and how do we construct the tools we need for all of us to weather the storm?
![No, you do not need a new N95 mask after [#] hours.](https://i2.wp.com/www.lavenderhat.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/LA_smog_masks.jpg?resize=524%2C416&ssl=1)
No, you do not need a new N95 mask after [#] hours.
Particulate respirators get MORE EFFICIENT (they trap more particles) as you use them. From what I’ve been able to piece together from technical reports and government studies, there’s no danger in continuing to use them as for as long as you can physically breath through them. So instead of stockpiling enough to throw a good mask away every day, give your extras to people who are outside without one, especially homeless people.
Against Arrogance
Deciding that my “thinking very hard” is better than yours either requires more specific (externally observable) criteria, or an arrogant assumption that I am smarter. Any argument that depends on the objective superiority of one person’s subjective internal processes over another’s, is arrogant. I claim that arrogant arguments should be avoided, on both ethical and epistemological grounds – and any framework that can only be justified with arrogance, should be discarded. Where there are multiple narratives that are equally “true” (in predictive value and inter-subjective evaluation), I propose we break ties by looking at what is more useful instead of resorting to arrogance in a quest for Truth.
A Difference of Values: “This is by design” does not refute “This is wrong”
Fact: “our government was not designed to be a democracy where everyone has equal say.”
Fact: “our government was designed to be a federation of states, all with their own government, which is why every state gets the same amount of Senators”
Those are both facts. They are both true. They are not opposing arguments any more than “the sun is a star” is a rebuttal to “the earth is a planet”. This is not a question of ignorance. The difference is in the implicit assumption about political imagination.