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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
triviallytrue
triviallytrue

I just don't really understand the modern discourse on homelessness. I mean the conservative position is pretty well staked out at this point (send the police to harass, arrest, and occasionally kill them) but what's the liberal messaging here? Affordable housing, sure, but seriously, what's the plan for people who can't work or otherwise make money?

loving-n0t-heyting

Speaking from the loony far left state of california, the answer in large part is: establish special courts to help round up, imprison, and forcibly drug gross homeless ppl acting too weird for public consumption

I think the last couple of years in NY and CA should really put to rest the idea that american liberals can clearly collectively claim the mantle of “humane” attitudes on the homeless problem

morlock-holmes

Speaking from Portland: sheer apathy.

As far as I can tell there essentially *aren't* two different political opinions on homelessness in the US; we the voters have numerous ideas about how to handle it but the political establishment seems entirely committed to a policy of haphazard warehousing based on how much man-power they can get out of the cops.

This is slightly too cynical, but only slightly; Portland has created various systems to slightly ease difficulties for homeless people but housing has been sluggish and the main political battles from elected officials relate to which neighborhoods the tent cities should be put in.

the-selfie-ofdoriangray

My view (from NY, a city where these seem to be the default approach to everything):

The “liberal” view (non-Eric Adams/non-conservative elected democrats) is that we should give more money to the extant homelessness-related NGOs, while never checking to see if they’re achieving anything. We should also make vague noises towards how the (legally-required) right to shelter is too goddamn burdensome, and maybe we should ship them to the suburbs. If somebody proposes building more shelters (or houses), it better not be near me or anybody I know.

The “leftist” view (more progressive members of the city council) is that we should give more money to the extant homelessness-related NGOs, while never checking to see if they’re achieving anything. If somebody proposes building more shelters, it better also be a community center/free repair space/center for LGBT youths/community garden/anticapitalist education center/doula training center. If somebody proposes building more houses, it better not be mathematically possible for anybody to make money on it.

triviallytrue
triviallytrue

I just don't really understand the modern discourse on homelessness. I mean the conservative position is pretty well staked out at this point (send the police to harass, arrest, and occasionally kill them) but what's the liberal messaging here? Affordable housing, sure, but seriously, what's the plan for people who can't work or otherwise make money?

loving-n0t-heyting

Speaking from the loony far left state of california, the answer in large part is: establish special courts to help round up, imprison, and forcibly drug gross homeless ppl acting too weird for public consumption

I think the last couple of years in NY and CA should really put to rest the idea that american liberals can clearly collectively claim the mantle of “humane” attitudes on the homeless problem

morlock-holmes

Speaking from Portland: sheer apathy.

As far as I can tell there essentially *aren't* two different political opinions on homelessness in the US; we the voters have numerous ideas about how to handle it but the political establishment seems entirely committed to a policy of haphazard warehousing based on how much man-power they can get out of the cops.

This is slightly too cynical, but only slightly; Portland has created various systems to slightly ease difficulties for homeless people but housing has been sluggish and the main political battles from elected officials relate to which neighborhoods the tent cities should be put in.

the-selfie-ofdoriangray

My view (from NY, a city where these seem to be the default approach to everything):

The “liberal” view (non-Eric Adams/non-conservative elected democrats) is that we should give more money to the extant homelessness-related NGOs, while never checking to see if they’re achieving anything. We should also make vague noises towards how the (legally-required) right to shelter is too goddamn burdensome, and maybe we should ship them to the suburbs. If somebody proposes building more shelters (or houses), it better not be near me or anybody I know.

The “leftist” view (more progressive members of the city council) is that we should give more money to the extant homelessness-related NGOs, while never checking to see if they’re achieving anything. If somebody proposes building more shelters, it better also be a community center/free repair space/center for LGBT youths/community garden/anticapitalist education center/doula training center. If somebody proposes building more houses, it better not be mathematically possible for anybody to make money on it.

algorithmist
666coyotewoman666

its funny that im still an ml and still have very deep ambivalences about anarchism and existing anarchist movements but the kind of arguments that circulate among mls, libs and libs who think they're leftists are so ridiculously bad faith that i feel offended on anarchists' behalf. it is almost nothing but thought terminating bullshit. "anarchists don't have a good argument for insulin production!" "anarchists don't have a good argument for food production!" they don't have a good argument for them because the very parameters of these arguments are meant to push anarchists to compromise on what they're saying; it is difficult to imagine what a large scale post industrial and decentralized production of medicine would look like, so it is assumed it would be nothing but randos making medications in dirty bathrooms. anarchists are expected to respond to the nonexistent dirty bathroom medicine production problem in the anarchist society that doesn't exist by clarifying that, no, they do still believe in centralized medicinal production and they also support continuing the medical industry and the extractive processes necessary therein etc. essentially the same purpose as the "if you wanna abolish prisons what will you do about RAPISTS and MURDERERS" gotcha, where the only acceptable argument for the people peddling it is to concede ground on carceral logic. and like the prison argument, if you reject the framing entirely, you are accused of supporting the problem. "oh you DONT have a broad schematic of what large scale and reliable insulin production would look like in a post industrial anarcho communist society? wow i guess you want diabetics to die then". you can only critique society if you have an all encompassing vision for what will replace the current society. liberals do this to anti-capitalists by demanding a comprehensive system to replace capitalism on hand, and it's equally bad faith to do this to anarchists, as if we can only condemn societal institutions if we know exactly what should be done to replace them, rather than condemning these institutions for the harm they're causing right now.

adjoint-law
katrafiy

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I think about this image a lot. This is an image from the Aurat March (Women's March) in Karachi, Pakistan, on International Women's Day 2018. The women in the picture are Pakistani trans women, aka khwaja siras or hijras; one is a friend of a close friend of mine.

In the eyes of the Pakistani government and anthropologists, they're a "third gender." They're denied access to many resources that are available to cis women. Trans women in Pakistan didn't decide to be third-gendered; cis people force it on them whether they like it or not.


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Western anthropologists are keen on seeing non-Western trans women as culturally constructed third genders, "neither male nor female," and often contrast them (a "legitimate" third gender accepted in its culture) with Western trans women (horrific parodies of female stereotypes).

There's a lot of smoke and mirrors and jargon used to obscure the fact that while each culture's trans women are treated as a single culturally constructed identity separate from all other trans women, cis women are treated as a universal category that can just be called "women."


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Even though Pakistani aurat and German Frauen and Guatemalan mujer will generally lead extraordinarily different lives due to the differences in culture, they are universally recognized as women.


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The transmisogynist will say, "Yes, but we can't ignore the way gender is culturally constructed, and hijras aren't trans women, they're a third gender. Now let's worry less about trans people and more about the rights of women in Burkina Faso."


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In other words, to the transmisogynist, all cis women are women, and all trans women are something else.


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"But Kat, you're not Indian or Pakistani. You're not a hijra or khwaja sira, why is this so important to you?"

Have you ever heard of the Neapolitan third gender "femminiello"? It's the term my moniker "The Femme in Yellow" is derived from, and yes, I'm Neapolitan. Shut up.

I'm going to tell you a little bit about the femminielli, and I want you to see if any of this sounds familiar. Femminielli are a third gender in Neapolitan culture of people assigned male at birth who have a feminine gender expression.

They are lauded and respected in the local culture, considered to be good omens and bringers of good luck. At festivals you'd bring a femminiello with you to go gambling, and often they would be brought in to give blessings to newborns. Noticing anything familiar yet?

Oh and also they were largely relegated to begging and sex work and were not allowed to be educated and many were homeless and lived in the back alleys of Naples, but you know we don't really like to mention that part because it sounds a lot less romantic and mystical.

And if you're sitting there, asking yourself why a an accurate description of femminiello sounds almost note for note like the same way hijras get described and talked about, then you can start to understand why that picture at the start of this post has so much meaning for me.

And you can also start to understand why I get so frustrated when I see other queer people buy into this fool notion that for some reason the transes from different cultures must never mix.

That friend I mentioned earlier is a white American trans woman. She spent years living in India, and as I recal the story the family she was staying with saw her as a white, foreign hijra and she was asked to use her magic hijra powers to bless the house she was staying in.

So when it comes to various cultural trans identities there are two ways we can look at this. We can look at things from a standpoint of expressed identity, in which case we have to preferentially choose to translate one word for the local word, or to leave it untranslated.

If we translate it, people will say we're artificially imposing an outside category (so long as it's not cis people, that's fine). If we don't, what we're implying, is that this concept doesn't exist in the target language, which suggests that it's fundamentally a different thing

A concrete example is that Serena Nanda in her 1990 and 2000 books, bent over backwards to say that Hijras are categorically NOT trans women. Lots of them are!


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And Don Kulick bent over backwards in his 1998 book to say that travesti are categorically NOT trans women, even though some of the ones he cited were then and are now trans women.

The other option, is to look at practice, and talk about a community of practice of people who are AMAB, who wear women's clothing, take women's names, fulfill women's social roles, use women's language and mannerisms, etc WITHIN THEIR OWN CULTURAL CONTEXT.

This community of practice, whatever we want to call it - trans woman, hijra, transfeminine, femminiello, fairy, queen, to name just a few - can then be seen to CLEARLY be trans-national and trans-cultural in a way that is not clearly evident in the other way of looking at things.

And this is important, in my mind, because it is this axis of similarity that is serving as the basis for a growing transnational transgender rights movement, particularly in South Asia. It's why you see pictures like this one taken at the 2018 Aurat March in Karachi, Pakistan.

And it also groups rather than splits, pointing out not only points of continuity in the practices of western trans women and fa'afafines, but also between trans women in South Asia outside the hijra community, and members of the hijra community both trans women and not.

To be blunt, I'm not all that interested in the word trans woman, or the word hijra. I'm not interested in the word femminiello or the word fa'afafine.

I'm interested in the fact that when I visit India, and I meet hijras (or trans women, self-expressed) and I say I'm a trans woman, we suddenly sit together, talk about life, they ask to see American hormones and compare them to Indian hormones.

There is a shared community of practice that creates a bond between us that cis people don't have. That's not to say that we all have the exact same internal sense of self, but for the most part, we belong to the same community of practice based on life histories and behavior.

I think that's something cis people have absolutely missed - largely in an effort to artificially isolate trans women. This practice of arguing about whether a particular "third gender" label = trans women or not, also tends to artificially homogenize trans women as a group.

You see this in Kulick and Nanda, where if you read them, you could be forgiven for thinking all American trans women are white, middle class, middle-aged, and college-educated, who all follow rigid codes of behavior and surgical schedules prescribed by male physicians.

There are trans women who think of themselves as separate from cis women, as literally another kind of thing, there are trans women who think of themselves as coterminous with cis women, there are trans women who think of themselves as anything under the sun you want to imagine.

The problem is that historically, cis people have gone to tremendous lengths to destroy points of continuity in the transgender community (see everything I've cited and more), and particularly this has been an exercise in transmisogyny of grotesque levels.

The question is do you want to talk about culturally different ways of being trans, or do you want to try to create as many neatly-boxed third genders as you can to prop up transphobic theoretical frameworks? To date, people have done the latter. I'm interested in the former.

I guess what I'm really trying to say with all of this is that we're all family y'all.

triviallytrue
sexhaver

"chatGPT will confidently spit out information cobbled together from various sources in its dataset that sounds correct even when it blatantly isn't"

correct! that's why it's important to remember that chatbots don't have any sort of inherent fact-checking

"this means it's LYING to you! why, i work at a library, and just the other day, i had three college students submit lists of entirely nonexistent articles that chatGPT had cited as sources!"

well i think "lying" is anthropomorphizing it a little bit too m- oh my god what the fuck graduate students are using chatGPT as a resource? for writing PAPERS???? and not even googling the articles they asked you for first??? and you think the issue here is fucking CHATGPT???????

triviallytrue
hailmaryfullofgrace55675

due to crude half-baked misunderstandings of intersectionality, you might initially think that a gay jew obviously has it harder than a gay christian, because two oppressions is more than one, and privilege and oppression work like effect multipliers in a videogame. but actually, when 81% of jews believe homosexuality should be accepted and only 16% believe it should be discouraged, and the figures are 54 to 38 for christians, you’re looking at gay christians facing significantly higher rates of rejection from their communities, families, and religious institutions.

you might think that the more christian a group is, the more hegemonic it is, and thus the more privileged the members. in some situations, in some senses, this may even be true. but a key consideration is that religious fundamentalist groups are bad to be in, especially for women and lgbt people. a lesbian raised into evangelical christianity was raised, yes, into a group with disturbing cultural sway in USAmerican politics, but also into a group very dedicated to and effective at making people like her want to die. the people high control religious groups hurt most are their own members. this is a vital consideration when talking to and about people who have left christianity, especially fundamentalist and repressive christian denominations. it may be tempting, for some people, to consider ex-christians barely-reformed representatives of the hegemony, who can’t possibly understand what it is to be repressed by christianity the way a jew does. but please consider that people who have been emotionally traumatized on religious grounds by their christian families and communities have direct, visceral, non-hypothetical experience of being actually, irl abused by these institutions. getting antisemitically microaggressed by your christian coworker is, i need to stress this, not actually as bad as being religiously abused.

religious abuse is by no means unique to christians, jews do it too, fundamentalists particularly but by no means exclusively, this doesn’t mean that lgbt jews aren’t oppressed or aren’t oppressed in distinct ways or situations, it doesn’t mean you can’t be annoyed at ex christians getting stuff wrong, it doesn’t mean that christians are the real victims of christianity or that members of minority religions aren’t, it means have a sense of the meaning of actual individual human suffering relative to the notional minority stress of being officially, statistically at risk for oppression. and have some compassion.