Trump’s transgender mice 🤭

+1 for Posteo

this would probably just lead to the corporation taking more and more of a role until thet take over development of the FOSS projects they care about, which is a particular nightmare I would prefer to avoid

was upset enough when Microsoft bought Github

or used his own personal copies, one article said he “repurposed” the books, which does imply he didn’t buy new books to make the art

from the article:

Artist Tai Ericson, who lives in the US state of Vermont, began deconstructing the books to create the artworks in protest at JK Rowling’s views on trans people.

It looks like he cuts out letters from the pages and glues them together to form an image, you can see the detail on his website:

to be fair the original headline is:

Artist uses Harry Potter books to create powerful portraits of murdered trans women

murd3red might just be from trying to circumvent censorship on other social media sites, I assume TikTok, but I’m not sure (I don’t use any social media like that).

is your point that brainwashing is more humane than a gun to the head? I’m not sure that’s the best take-away, I wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression that hegemony is primarily humanistic compared to more violent forms of imperialism … Hegemony is more like self-harm propaganda, scams, and other malicious belief systems - it’s just a form of power and control, and is no less coercive … remember that the consequences of going against hegemony is often punishment, the alternative to accepting brainwashing is to have the gun to your head (if you don’t cut it in an office environment, the alternative is desperate wage work).

Even when you don’t fully endorse hegemony, you still behaviorally go along to avoid punishment, the self-regulation is cheaper and easier for those in power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemony#Media_and_communications_studies

Adopted from the work of Gramsci and Stuart Hall, in media studies and cultural studies hegemony refers to individuals or concepts that become most dominant in a culture. Building on Gramsci’s ideas, Hall stated that the media is a critical institution for furthering or inhibiting hegemony.

Communications studies scholars have argued that in the praxis of hegemony, imperial dominance is established by means of cultural imperialism, whereby the leader state (hegemon) dictates the internal politics and the societal character of the subordinate states that constitute the hegemonic sphere of influence, either by an internal, sponsored government or by an external, installed government. The imposition of the hegemon’s way of life—an imperial lingua franca and bureaucracies (social, economic, educational, governing)—transforms the concrete imperialism of direct military domination into the abstract power of the status quo, indirect imperial domination. …

Culturally, hegemony also is established by means of language, specifically the imposed lingua franca of the hegemon (leader state), which then is the official source of information for the people of the society of the sub-ordinate state. Writing on language and power, Andrea Mayr says, “As a practice of power, hegemony operates largely through language.” In contemporary society, an example of the use of language in this way is in the way Western countries set up educational systems in African countries mediated by Western languages.

this comes to mind, basically the kind of thinking in the OP represents a kind of corporate / capitalist hegemonic perspective - employers want you to sacrifice everything for them, ideally at any cost to your own health, liberty, etc., and there is a notion that if you align with those values you are a good worker - you should want to work all the time, you should feel bad for taking paid leave, etc.

This is in opposition to the kind of economic violence and desperation that faces wage workers - no Walmart store employee is being told they need to want to come in to work and not take paid leave, because those workers are already desperate for their wages and are probably relying on government aid programs to bridge the gap in their wages to pay for food.

Instead, in contexts where workers are not desperate and under immediate threat of losing shelter and food is where you find this kind of hegemonic messaging is so strong - the white collar employees who come into offices are the ones who are being made to feel guilty for taking paid leave, they are the ones who are expected to show up to work happy and self-motivated, and to want to be at work every day, to work in the evenings and over weekends without pay, etc. - that’s hegemony, it operates through acceptance of a system of beliefs and values, and through self-regulation (rather than direct threats).

tortillas

you should x-post on [email protected] and other sewing communities!

China does not allow or recognize same-sex marriages, are jailing gay women for writing erotica online, trans people have to have bottom surgery before they are permitted to update official documents, trans women are forced to notify their family and prove they have no criminal record before being allowed access to HRT, and in 2022 China passed a law preventing buying estrogen or anti-androgens online even with a prescription.

This is all much worse than in the US where most states allow you to update your gender marker on official documents without surgery, HRT can be obtained on the basis of informed consent (and without requirements of disclosing to family or having no criminal record), and LGBT+ people are not being jailed for writing erotica …

The U.S. is indeed dangerous, and you are probably in greater danger of being a victim of stochastic violence in the U.S. than in China, but that is not the only thing that people look at when deciding if a country has better or worse laws, rights, or conditions for LGBT+ people.

I’m sorry, I meant my comment mostly in jest (and somewhat bewilderment), I didn’t mean to come across as rude 🤐

If your point is that Americans are in a stronger position to enter a foreign country and stay there by various means like getting sponsored by an employer or on a student visa, that seems clear enough - that’s true even if just on the basis that Americans tend to have more money, assets in US dollars, and potentially better opportunities to get sought-after education in the U.S. that would make them skilled laborers in other parts of the world.

My point was just to clarify that getting that legal basis of staying in the foreign country (which is the point of the asylum claim) is not trivial even if it is easier for Americans relative to other nationalities. There are trans people in detention camps in Europe because they declared asylum and are being prepared for deportation back to the U.S. - not everyone is a skilled laborer or eligible to be a student (let alone successful in pursuing those opportunities).

And most of the trans population does not have passports, let alone the financial means to leave the country. Fleeing the country is a solution for a privileged minority. Most of us can’t even leave the oppressive states we live in and move to more progressive states with laws that protect trans folks.

Also, the U.S. is still one of the best places in the world to be trans - we have better access to trans healthcare and rights than most of the rest of the world, and even the rest of the West. The situation is deteriorating (as it is in most of the rest of the world), but they did not even succeed in passing a trans athlete ban through Congress, let alone criminalization of being trans or revocation of care. Nothing like the laws that were on the books in the 1970s that outright banned “cross-dressing” have been passed or enforced.

love Max Ernst, and this is such a great interpretation of the work!

Here’s a piece of artwork that resonated with my experience of gender:

Here’s a transcript of the blurb:

Reflecting on societal expectations to be a nurturing and protective mother, Louise Bourgeois described Nature Study as a self-portrait that explores themes of alienation, family, gender, identity, and maternity. The multi-breasted, headless creature pays homage to a number of ancient guardian deities including Cybele, the mother-goddess who symbolizes fertility in Phrygian and later Greco-Roman ancient mythology.

Bourgeois produced the figure in a variety of different media, including bronze, marble, porcelain, rubber, and wax. Among Bourgeois’s most iconic works, Nature Study emphasizes evolution, metamorphosis, and hybrid ways of being that blur animal and human, male and female – concerns central to her sculptural production.

For me it conveyed aspects of being dehumanized and animalistic which relates to the way I experience my gender as monstrous; the sculpture obviously has elements evoking both male and female sexes, but overall feels female. Just struck me as deeply relatable.

> making false claims that Americans can go anywhere and stay

> thinking trans people would be seeking asylum in Russia

> account is new

you sure you’re not some kind of bot?

this, I hate using GUIs - they’re slow and inconvenient in so many ways

also, terminal commands can be thrown in a script to easily automate or schedule tasks, unlike all that manual clicking in a GUI

s

the American passport allows for easy initial entry, but doesn’t guarantee permanent residence, asylum cases are to permit people to stay legally in the country longer than the (short) initial period allowed for tourism …

this isn’t true, being American does not grant you indefinite legal right to live in other countries - you have to find some way to be sponsored and have a visa that gives you a legal basis

being able to visit a country for a short period of time as a tourist is not the same as being able to legally stay longer, get a job, secure housing, etc.

Canada is not accepting American LGBT+ folks’ asylum claims, there was a single case of a non-binary person who was not deported because they were a caretaker and because the US could be unsafe, and there is an American trans woman’s asylum claim that will be heard, but neither case establishes that American asylum claims will be accepted

as far as I know, no country is granting asylum to trans people fleeing America, and no the recent Supreme Court decision to allow Trump to enforce his policy while the court case is pending does not change that

whether other countries grant asylum is not necessarily the same as whether the US is actually unsafe enough for trans people to need to flee, though