kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (swiss army gender)
And, look, I do in fact recognise all the work involved in arriving at inclusion of a question about gender identity with a write-in field, but I still mostly want to scream and also cry.

Read more... )
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (swiss army gender)
A new project, Improving the integration of care for trans adults, has recently launched and is seeking survey responses from people whose gender does not correspond (partially or completely) with the gender they were assigned at birth, who are over the age of eighteen, and who currently live in the UK.

I know and am happy to vouch for several of the (trans!) people running this.
kaberett: Photo of a pile of old leather-bound books. (books)
I keep being surprised by "scríobh", because of course it's cognate with "schreiben", in much the same way that I am surprised by Chaucer -- I read a word and understand it without effort or thought or reflection and then have to stop and work out why, exactly, it is that "sikerly" (sicherlich) made such immediate sense to me.

Anyway, both are (independently) from the Latin scrībō, and similarity in pronunciation appears largely coincidental, from a cursory poke around.

(I am also enjoying "shoe": bróg.)
kaberett: (the lost thing)
Thank you to everyone over here who linked me to the Never Again Means Now fundraiser, aiming to cover legal fees for people involved in direct action against the US' concentration camps; I wanted to let you know that I've put the link up on FB, I appear to have been the first person in my extended social sphere to have done so, and it is getting a lot of traction and onward sharing.

I had been feeling utterly hopeless and powerless, and being able to put money towards this is helping. Thank you.

(I wish I had the cope to write a round-up of what this is and why it's important and why I think it's a useful way to spend money on the problem, but I'm afraid I'm one week post-Decapeptyl and I just can't.)
kaberett: Yellow gingko leaf against teal background (gingko)
The t-shirt I wore to cast my second vote today:

A torso dressed in a navy blue t-shirt with stylised yellow sun, moon and stars, with text "Muncie Girls"


(I was a proxy. It didn't occur to me until after I'd already cast my first vote that of course this was the most appropriate clothing I owned for the occasion. For your amusement: the album title is Fixed Ideals.)

Beneath the cut, a very similar photo, minus the t-shirt. It's exactly one year since I got top surgery. NSFW, probably.

Read more... )

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May. 7th, 2019 09:12 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
  • I engaged in kind and gentle enquiry on the topic of Brexit. (Draw parallels between the People's Vote and Erdoğan all you like, but I will ask you to explain to me why that's a better comparison than, say, Switzerland. Because I do not, in fact, get it.)
  • Today in Alex vs Bureaucracy: I have made a GP appointment for the end of the month. I will probably start getting HRT shortly thereafter. (!) I have also e-mailed the council (after they failed to pick up the phone) explaining that (i) I do not have a key to the toilet block on site, and if my plot is being rated as Grade A presumably I should have one, and (ii) given that at least a third of my plot is covered in carpet AND THEN RAISED BEDS I would very much appreciate it if they would either give me a rebate on rent for the year or arrange to help me clear said carpet, which was evidently laid in contravention of a previous plot-holder's tenancy agreement. A key has been put in the post, and my rent for the year has been waived.
  • A is dyed and shorn; my todo list for the week includes actually taking some photos of him and making a list of the dyes I've used for future reference. (It turns out I did remember all the colours I'd used, but it'd be nice to be a little less uncertain next time around.)
  • hello how are you I am really enjoying and appreciating how much you all are commenting <3
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[Content notes: UK politics, disability, gender]

Read more... )

***

[Content notes: state violence, policing, incarceration, white person discovers racism]

Read more... )

***

I've had time to read because I am fairly emphatically Taking This Week Off in the Peaks, after three frustrating days on the mass spec last week (resulting in 0 usable data). I am fairly shortly setting off to spend the afternoon at Biddulph Grange Garden; I found it by looking through National Trust properties within striking distance of the cottage we're staying in, and then realised it was ringing a faint bell. I eventually recalled that [personal profile] nanila had been singing its praises remarkably recently, and thus the decision was made.

I have also been playing some more board games; less than I expected but more than zero, with the big obvious progress being that when Our Host expressed doubt over whether I'd get on okay with Avalon I checked in with A, and then pushed to play it anyway. (My side lost! But I did well at my role.) The less-obvious progress is that I'm reaching the point where I'm not spending new-to-me games mostly focussed on managing my anxiety, and consequently am beginning to very tentatively build a model of why People In General enjoy board games. In particular, I'm tentatively beginning to see how people might enjoy them in a way that isn't centred on self-aggrandisement and competitiveness; instead, I think I am beginning to understand the use of games as combination social vehicle and, mmm, experiments in collaboration and problem-solving and exploration: collectively enjoying investigating How This Works, and How It's Different, in a similar fashion to talking about what Interesting And New things a given book is doing.

I'm not certain about this yet! But it still feels like progress to be moving from "panic" to "tentative modelling", and I suspect that once I'm secure enough in my modelling I'll be able to start working out whether I enjoy the games.
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
So this afternoon I phoned up to pay for some theatre tickets I'd previously reserved pending actually joining the theatre-in-question's access scheme (feminist... witches... modern dance... at Sadler's Wells, suggested by a friend who works there, we're going on Friday), and the staff member was all "... what is this Em Ex, I have never heard of it before, should it be Ms? or Mr?"

Whereupon I, naturally wishing to avoid this conversation, responded something to the tune of "no, Mx is correct" and breezed on to the next bit. My interlocutor, however, was not to be deterred, and a little while later revisited the theme of "I've never heard of it before!"

At this point I was, unsurprisingly, Bracing For A Fight, but I am also (albeit inconsistently) attempting to apply the maxim of Assume Good Faith mostly for the sake of watching people flounder around in being apparently misunderstood. So: I launched into "well, you know how Ms is for people who don't want to say whether they're married or not?"

"Yes!" said my interlocutor, "that's what I always put down."

"Well," I said, "Mx is like that, but for if you're even more, you know, and you don't want to say..."

"— there's a TITLE FOR THAT?"

"... yeah, the NHS and a bunch of banks and a bunch of charities use i--"

"CAN I USE IT."

"... ye-e-es, of course you can...?"

"I ALWAYS FEEL WEIRD PUTTING DOWN MS. YOU HAVE MADE MY DAY."

(I paraphrase slightly -- somewhere in there I made the joke about "you know, if you don't want to join the military or become a priest" -- but this is very much the sense of the thing.)
kaberett: a watercolour painting of an oak leaf floating on calm water (leaf-on-water)
So I seriously need to work this out some more, but given that I'm still struggling to make words happen, here's a sketch:

I grew up as a small queer Catholic, who had to be closeted about both the queerness and the Catholicism, and was made very ill indeed by fighting my way clear of love the sinner, hate the sin.

And my sticking point with rehabilitative justice is routinely "okay, but what about the people who know exactly what they're doing and are doing it for fun and are categorically uninterested in stopping?" Of whom I have known... several. And I think at least part of my problem there is my pseudo-allergic response to anything that looks even superficially like love the sinner, hate the sin, where if you're just kind and loving and gentle with people for long enough they will Realise The Error Of Their Ways and that They Were Wrong All Along, because of how toxic and gaslighting that can be.

Which brings me back around again to the thing I've been attempting to write a post about and failing since shortly after my "I am twitchy as fuck about the rhetoric I'm seeing around antifa, here's why" (thank you for your engagement and input on that, various, it was enormously helpful and I haven't stopped thinking about it), in the general vicinity of talking at cross purposes, and I haven't managed to actually pin it down yet but I'm still intending to. But this I can sketch, around ideas-that-turn-toxic and abusers-will-abuse-anything and baby-and-bathwater and examining-my-motivations, so. Here's a sketch.
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
Next steps: passport application form; working out how to register to vote in the abortion referendum next year (if I even can).
kaberett: photograph of the Moon taken from the northern hemisphere by GH Revera (moon)
So as best I can tell, [personal profile] tim has just unfriended me everywhere on the entire Internet because -- I can only assume -- of the post I made yesterday, which disagrees pretty strenuously with his latest post about this twitter thread. I think it forms part of a disturbing pattern of behaviour on his part: I've tried (repeatedly!) expressing concern about his ableism in comments on his posts (as have others), and I've seen similar concerns expressed about his approaches to racism and other areas of oppression. He's point-blank refused to engage, as is of course his absolute right, but I am increasingly scared by how unwilling he seems to be to admit to mistakes or nuance, given ~his position in the feminist community~ and all that shit.

So here's the comment I left on that latest post, which is screened and which I imagine is likely to remain so, because actually I think the content is important.

(I hate that this is, in essence, a "call-out" post? But [personal profile] tim has been very clear that he thinks call-out culture is a good thing, and I have tried -- repeatedly -- to talk to him about this in his space. It has gone nowhere. So: now I'm talking about it in mine. Because I'm scared, and because I think engaging critically with his position statements actually matters, and he seems to be very keen to prevent that. Here we are.)

Read more... )
kaberett: a patch of sunlight on the carpet, shaped like a slightly wonky heart (light hearted)
Remember last time we did this?

You make things seem more possible.

I will, as ever, be unscreening and making up an index as we go. Please nominate yourselves; please nominate each other; please signal boost.

I see you, and you're not alone.

Index. )

Status: still open!
Last unscreened: the_quorum
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
Prompted by having received an utterly anodyne response from the party that completely ignored all of the actual issues I raised.

So, with content notes for transmisogyny and transmisogynist violence, here's the very brief summary of why -- regardless of party leadership's opinion on that matter -- that poster is Not Okay. (Yes, I have explained this in painstaking detail in reply to the e-mail from the party.)

Read more... )
kaberett: Photo of a cassowary with head tilted to one side (cassowary)
Shut The Fuck Up, Marvel:
"Shut The Fuck Up, Marvel" is a nearly 30k long essay, a spiritual sequel to The Problems With Comics, a deep dive into the true issues with Marvel's economics and business - and how an obsession with short term profit, the constant renumbering and relaunches and events, all compounded by a complete inability to understand basic marketing techniques or outside audiences, has absolutely destroyed the sales stability of many of their former best selling books, all as they condescend to those who criticize them on their stories, or on how they try to sell comics.


Marvel's Secret Empire kicks off by doubling down on Captain America's Nazi past.
kaberett: Photo of a pile of old leather-bound books. (books)
This is not terribly clearly articulated (i.e. I pieced it together while mostly asleep on a car journey back up from very-nearly-the-farthest-reaches-of-Cornwall) and I'm absolutely certain it's not original, but nonetheless here's a thought on UK politics relevant to the general election campaign in which we find ourselves mired, sparked by reflection on Theresa May's emphasis on strong and stable government.

Read more... )
kaberett: Stylized volcano against a stormy sky, with streams of lava running down its sides. (volcano)
... it being the UK release of Guardians of the Galaxy 2.

Exhibit A: Nazi Captain America holding Thor's hammer, with an associated discussion of symbology, senior Marvel staff donations to the 45th US President's campaign, etc

Exhibit B: Marvel asking comic stores to change their logos to Hydra symbols and staff to wear Hydra t-shirts.


Like. Especially maybe don't give them opening-weekend money for this shit, please?
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
As discussed by [personal profile] rydra_wong, tomorrow afternoon Inclusion London and Disabled People Against The Cuts are hosting a briefing and discussion session regarding the UN finding that the UK government was engaging in grave and systematic violations of the rights of disabled people.

You can use WriteToThem to find, and write to, your MP, in order to draw this session to their attention and urge them to attend. The event details are:
Grave and systematic violations – What next after the UN disability inquiry? Briefing and Discussion
Committee Room 12, Houses of Parliament
2.30 – 3.45pm Tuesday 24th January 2017



My letter specifically pulls my MP up on his comprehensive failure to respond to my previous e-mail to him so will be of limited use, but just in case: Read more... )

(If any of you have the cope to adapt this for [community profile] spoonlessactivists, please by all means go ahead and do so.)

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kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
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