Daily OpusEverything I write is freely rebloggable. Just keep the source and tell people about my books :D [Until I decide otherwise, my pronouns are Ze/Hir/Hirself. As in "Ze went to the shops to get hir medication hirself". Thank you for the respect.]
Arkansas just overrode the governor’s veto and banned physicians from providing any and all gender affirming health care for youth and that strips over 200 trans youth currently on puberty blockers of medications they need.
I have been donating to Intransitive, which provides support for trans youth in Arkansas. They are going to need all the help they can get now that the bill is law. If you have anything extra to donate their ActBlue link is https://secure.actblue.com/donate/intransitive
Or you can donate via Resilient Trans folks in Arkansas
Here in the UK, a trans author has had her brilliant book nominated by the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the UK’s embarrassing cohort of TERFs in the literary and publishing industry have assembled to write a disgusting open letter denouncing her nomination and misgendering her. As gross as this is, it’s actually just another day on TERF Island (aka Britain).
No, the absurd thing about this particular open letter is that they have added the signatures of authors who are long dead, I guess in some desperate attempt to legitimise their bullshit. Those signatories include Aphra Behn, a queer 17th century playwright who wrote a poem about a lover who switches their sex during love-making and is of indeterminate gender, and Daphne du Maurier, who is an icon for queer people and who also quite famously struggled with her gender identity (it’s fully fucking on her Wiki page, a cursory googling would’ve sufficed to show you that lol). Other famously gender conforming cishet women (/s) signatories include George Eliot, Willa Cather, and Emily Dickinson. Bizarrely, Charlotte Brontë has been put down as Curer Bell, whilst George Eliot has been put down as Mary Ann Evans. The most ironic thing about this being that Brontë rid herself of her Curer Bell pseudonym as soon as she possibly could, whereas Eliot (who was born Mary Ann Evans) was adamant that her chosen name and persona for her literary work was George Eliot. Ah, choice and autonomy, famously anathema to feminism (/s).
In conclusion, I’m not sure how radical or feminist it is to be completely ignorant about the dead women authors (as they’ve been posited in this letter) you evoke to add credence to a mess of a letter than is both transphobic and quite patently jealous. Write a better book if you want to be shortlisted next time.
I should point out that their letter suggests there’s been some kind of take-over of (cis) women only shortlists by trans women when this is the first trans woman to ever be nominated for this prize and all the other nominees are cis women.
Some TERFs have decided to point out to me on this post that Torrey Peters past work includes erotica (something that cis women write too, and it comes in all kinds of flavours), as well as lecturing me on the fact that Detransition, Baby explores some complicated themes and has some characters who are unlikeable/do things that aren’t 100% moral.
This is called ‘literature,’ my darlings. Cis women also write books like this, and I don’t think it actually says anything about them as people. Peters herself has said she wants to write books with trans characters who are just as dysfunctional as their cis counterparts because surprise! That’s real life.
Also, she wrote a book about a trans woman with a complicated relationship with a violent man and that’s somehow being used against her by these people…….these same people who are invoking the name of Daphne du Maurier, who wrote Rebecca which is very much about a woman’s complicated relationship with an immoral and previously violent man WHO KILLED HIS FIRST WIFE, and Charlotte Brontë who is well known for her exploration of Byronic heroes.
A Confederate monument valued at $500,000 was stolen in March from a Selma cemetery, officials confirmed today.
This morning, a group that claims to have taken the monument, the Jefferson Davis Memorial Chair, sent emails to AL.com saying they will give the chair to the United Daughters of the Confederacy if that organization agrees to hang a banner outside its Richmond, Va. headquarters.
In those emails, a group calling itself White Lies Matter say they stole the chair from the Old Live Oak Cemetery and are demanding that the UDC hang a large banner at 1 p.m. on Friday – the anniversary of the Confederacy’s surrender in the Civil War – and leave it there for 24 hours.
The banner bears a quote from Assata Shakur, a Black Liberation Army activist: “The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives.”
White Lies Matter said it had already delivered the banner to the UCD.
“Failure to do so will result in the monument, an ornate stone chair, immediately being turned into a toilet,” the email states. “If they do display the banner, not only will we return the chair intact, but we will clean it to boot.”
“Like most Confederate monuments, (the chair) mostly exists to remind those who’s freedom had to be purchased in blood, that there still exists a portion of our country that is more than willing to continue to spill blood to avoid paying that debt down,” the White Lies Matter email states.
“We took their toy, and we don’t feel guilty about it. They never play with it anyway. They just want it there to remind us what they’ve done, what they are still willing to do. But the south won’t rise again. Not as the Confederacy. Because that coalition left out a large portion of its population. All that’s left of that nightmare is an obscenely heavy chair that’s a throne for a ghost whose greatest accomplishment was treason.”
