communists must declare a 5 year program to become godless degenerates even more aggressively
Rainbow Bee-eaters (Merops ornatus), family Meropidae, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Photograph by Bipphy Kath
[ID: Two multicoloured birds perched on a thick diagonal tree branch, facing away from each other. The bird on the left is higher up on the branch, and is facing left with its back to the viewer, while the bird on the right is facing right and has its body turned towards the viewer. The birds have light green backs, shoulders, upper wings, and underparts, yellow-green crowns and napes, light blue lower backs and undertails, bright yellow throats, thin black horizontal bands under their throats, black mask-like bands over their eyes, each with a thinner, electric blue stripe underneath, orangeish outer wing feathers with dark indigo tips, dark indigo upper tails, reddish eyes, and moderately long, slightly decurved black beaks. Both birds also have two short, thin streamers on the ends of their tails. /End ID.]
[...] antiblackness has been central to establishing national borders and readily crosses them. Antiblackness has also been diasporically challenged and refused, making it central to what comprises the very notion of the African diaspora and of blackness. It is precisely through rather than against historically demarcated regional, national, linguistic, and state preoccupations that this discourse cyclically reorganizes itself. Antiblackness’s pliability is essential to the intransigent, complementary, and universalizing impetus of antiblack paradigms. Irrespective of the innumerable and ever-transient definitions of black identity across the diaspora, which by definition are ephemerally produced, all black(ened) people must contend with the burden of the antiblack animalization of the global paradigm of blackness, which will infringe on all articulations and political maneuverings that seek redress for present and historical violence.
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World
in Whipping Girl, Serano grapples with "nature vs nurture" "biology vs society" and so on, and she seems to fall into a sort of centrism where both models are wrong (or rather, only partially correct). her argument is that on the one hand, gender is very obviously socially mediated and (re)produced, and on the other, there is something within people that precedes the social and determines our comfort level with the gender roles we must perform in our lives - she calls this subconscious sex, this thing that everyone has, including cis people, but in trans people it produces this feeling that we are not living our gendered life correctly, that there is some disconnect deep down, that our assigned gender is dissatisfying in some intangible way that can only be resolved via transition. and this subconscious sex is maybe biological or maybe psychological, but it's something that can remain unmoved by the gendered social pressures we are forced to navigate, and therefore there is something "true," or at least compelling, about a partially biological conception of gender. It's not classical gender essentialism but rather a retraction of the essential element of gender away from our genitals and into our brains.
and i find this nature vs nurture dichotomy she explores extremely frustrating. first, for the obvious fact that it assumes a very limited experience set for trans people (a lifelong struggle with gender dysphoria that begins in childhood and culminates in a binarist transition from "one sex to the other"). this model is correct for some people, but it is also the model that medical and psychiatric institutions rely on when "diagnosing" us as "real" transgender people, excluding the possibility of exiting the binary altogether, of rejecting it outright, or of even experiencing the binary in different ways.
two, I don't actually think gender essentialists are making biological claims about sex and gender when they talk about the inherent differences between men and women, because the scientific consensus on the biological components of sex are far more complex than genitals = gender, a fact that has no bearing on reactionary beliefs about gender and sex. Gender essentialists are making political claims using the rhetoric of the biological, the natural. These people have political platforms and goals that are not even remotely restricted to the realm of biology - gender segregated bathrooms and change rooms as well as sports and competitive games, banning transition care for trans people, the violent enforcement of patriarchal & white supremacist western gender norms, the attendant political beliefs about the criminalization of sex work, and frequently, the banning of abortion - these are claims about the built environment, about entertainment & play, about medical care, about labour, about law and the role of the state in producing gender. What is "biological" to transphobes & homophobes is what is natural and unchanging, but paradoxically must also be violently imposed upon people in every sphere of their life in order to be maintained. You see conservatives do this all the time - they talk about natural law, about the rule of man, "survival of the fittest" being used to gleefully explain social murder, "natural differences in men and women", biological claims about racial superiority, and so on. These are not biological claims because these claims do not bear out empirically, they are claims using the authority of tradition cloaked in the authority of biology. "It's always been this way" is not about biology, it is a call to return to a mythical past, a past closer to the imagined "natural state" of human beings prior to the intrusion of "society" and its attendant degenerate tendencies that corrupt "pure" human beings (almost invariably articulated as antisemitic conspiracies about who "orchestrates" this societal degeneracy). They use biological rhetoric because of the supposed apolitical, objective, empirical nature of the natural sciences - they refer not to the epistemic discipline of biology but to the claim of objective authority conferred upon biology. biology cannot be countered with the social because it is outside the social. "facts don't care about your feelings" is a dead meme phrase by this point, but it is probably the perfect distillation of these peoples' worldviews. They are correct not because their beliefs are empirically proven, but because their beliefs provide a rationalisation for the world they want to build. It is the modern version of the divine right of kings. There is nothing "biological" about any of these discussions other than the fact that they argue about how human bodies can or should be used - which, if that's our standard for biological, then everything is biological.
Are trans people biologically their gender? I think we need to reject the premise of this question. It is conceding too much ground; it pivots the discussion to "proving" transness in laboratories, to arguing about our genitals or our chromosomes instead of health care or housing or labour or public space. It accepts as valid the rhetorical sleight of hand that bigots do where they mean "unchangeable" when they say "biological" - something that nobody believes anyway unless you want to also object to like, the sterilization of medical equipment or heart surgery. We circumvent and alter biology every day. Reactionaries do not care about biology even a little bit and we do not need to humour them by pretending otherwise. We have scientific understandings of gender that do not adopt a biological lens because that lens is unequipped to deal with what is going on in front of us.
I'm sympathetic to Serano's desire to locate an origin for the dysphoria a lot of trans people feel, particularly because it allows us to more easily justify our existence. I'm also sympathetic to the fact that when she wrote this book, the public discourse on trans people was very different from what it is today; she's not even close to the first person to engage with this nature v nurture debate because it's the debate all trans people are at some point forced to reckon with. but ultimately I think this conception of transness is both politically a non-starter and a concession to our enemies that we do not need to give
Sound on if you guys wanna know what a little King Vulture sounds like 👀
creachur… 🥺
btw if anyone wants to know what she looks like now. she’s one :)
Ngl antisemitism is a skeleton key that opens up a lot of conspiratorial right-wing thinking, it is at least vacuous and at worst irresponsible to explore most reactionary conspiracy theories without understanding how deep the Protocols of the Elders of Zion brainrot truly goes
t*rf ideology is like this too. Whatever its ideological priors, it's functionally become a limb of Great Replacement Theory and if you look at literally any of their Pepe Silvia ass attempts to document "who's behind all this" it's always some random rich, possibly gay or trans, Jew. This is because they need to sell books to antisemitic foamers but also because they can't really fit in with those people without drinking their kool-aid, and apparently it tastes pretty good to them
IN 1974, THE MAURITIUS KESTREL—A photogenic bird with a speckled white breast and a vibrant red back and crown—came frighteningly close to extinction. Only four individuals remained. Thanks to decades of captive breeding on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius, the kestrel population climbed to 1,000 birds. Half a century later, as their numbers once again decline, another species is helping the charismatic raptors hang on: the traveler’s tree, a palmlike plant in the genus Ravenala.
But traveler’s trees are invasive to Mauritius and are causing problems for other native species in the ecosystem. Conservationists are now faced with a challenge: how to remove the plant without harming the kestrels.
me: :(
spring birdies: peep peep
me: :)
hiiiii putting up another fundraiser post for my girlfriend morgan so she can get thumb splints that fit right :-) he is hypermobile and his hands have been bordering on nonfunctional lately, and he just got thumb splints that help a lot but it turns out they're not quite the right size + don't have the right supports. because of her disability and other life circumstances morgan doesn't have a job or much money right now, so she's asking for $180 to order two new splints with the right supports.
we're using my paypal, please say it's for morgan in the notes so i know!
0/180
please reblog if you can + don't tag this!
20/180!!
obligatory "we are in the er because morgan's thumb and wrist did something fucked up please help" reblog
21.80/180
Very cute Anhinga fledglings