#ask me to tag

saint-speaks:

canadianwheatpirates:

saint-speaks:

The abortion conversation is actually a perfect example of how asinine the concept of trans men having male privilege is. When people start talking about abortion rights, there is always at least a half a thousand posts made with the statement, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be free and available on every corner,”. Of course, this isn’t true- men can get pregnant, and we don’t have easy access to abortion — in fact, it’s often harder for men to get an abortion than it is for a woman.

Of course, if cisgender men could get pregnant, then maybe that original statement of “then abortion would be free and available of every corner,” might be slightly closer to the truth. That’s because the government/ the patriarchy is run with cisgender men in mind. Laws are made to make their lives easier. This isn’t the case for transgender men, in fact, the law is regularly working to make our lives much harder than that of a cisgender man or a cisgender woman’s.

The source of male privilege is the patriarchy, in simple terms, the patriarchy is the way that the government is built with cisgender men in mind. It supports only cisgender men. Not transgender men. Which is why transgender men doesn’t possess male privilege.

Instead, we get laws that make it harder for us to get birth control, and we get told to shut up by women whenever we try to talk about abortion and birth control from the male perspective, because it’s seen as “diverting the conversation away from the real victims (women),”.

[cw for transphobic rape, forced pregnancy, forced detransition]

Cis women’s takes on trans men and abortion also completely fail to think of the particular harms that we face in places that are anti-abortion.

The dominant narrative around trans men and abortion is that we have the same problems as cis women, plus we have “a more difficult time” accessing reproductive healthcare services (often with no explanation of what that actually means – being turned away because we have an M on our medical records, because we look like men even if we have an F on our medical records, being excluded from automatic notification systems like cervical smear reminders, etc). We’re treated as “cis women plus”, without much consideration to what the larger world looks like for trans men in states and countries with anti-abortion laws.

If you can’t terminate a pregnancy, and you can be charged with manslaughter for a miscarriage, then the legal system can force pregnant trans men to stop taking T regardless of the patient’s wishes. T isn’t birth control, but it does have adverse effects on pregnancies; it’s extremely likely that doctors will be forced to stop prescribing T to pregnant trans men so that they can’t be seen as complicit in “breaking the law” (inducing a miscarriage).

This means that cis men can forcibly detransition trans men by raping and impregnating us. The detransition is backed up socially when all pregnancy-related care services are “for women”; this forces us to live socially as women in order to not fucking die of neglect during pregnancy.

So not only do we not have male privilege, because access to these services is harder for us than it is for cis women, but we face specific dangers from anti-abortion law that cis women never fucking talk about, either because they don’t know or because they don’t think our forced detransition is a big deal.

Yeah, this as well.

I did meet up with a trans man once at a bar in Seattle, we were talking about the current abortion bill in Texas while getting a little too drunk, who spoke about a very similar issue, because it had happened to him.

He was sexually assaulted by a cis male roommate and ended up pregnant. It had turned out the man who had assaulted him had purposefully been stealing his birth control. He had been celibate and trying to figure out where his meds were going (and suspected someone in the shared-house he had been stealing them for some reason, but assumed it was one of the younger girls who had recently started dating), then he was rapped several times and told to his face that being pregnant would show him that he wasn’t a real man.

He lived in Texas at the time and this occurred numerous decades ago, this was before Robert Eads passed away. There was zero legal protection in place, anywhere on earth, for trans men who needed reproductive care, ovarian care, cervix care, or any other form of “female health care” and no movement, even within the queer community, was talking about the need for those protections.

It was the 80s. Getting an abortion in Texas as a woman was hard then (and is now), and it was impossible as a man. He had to de-transition to get an abortion. And by de-transition I mean the whole nine yards. He had to tell his therapist that he was a cisgender woman in order to get her help with getting an abortion.

He had just barely made it before the “it’s too late to get an abortion” line in the time-frame when he got his.

Not only that, but he had to wait until 1998 to get back on testosterone, because he had to lie and say he wanted to de-transition to get that abortion. The abortion he wouldn’t have been able to get unless he said he was a woman. Knowing that if he didn’t say he wanted to, he would have had to anyway during the period in which he was pregnant and would be forced to give birth, due to the reasons stated above by canadianwheatpirates.

That was over a decade of his life where he was fighting to re-transition, after he was raped and forced to de-transition in order to get an abortion. Over a decade of his life where he was just waiting and pleading for access to medical transition.

hootenanie:

overheard an old man talking about how he got a great deal on a bouquet of flowers and is excited to give them to his wife whose in the hospital rn because they’ll make her “happier than a faggot in boytown”. insane thing to say

i am caught in a constant internal struggle between needing a buff gf who can lift me and needing to BE a buff gf who can lift my partner. the agony is endless

dsmsix:

uncanny-aesthetic:

this place sucks I’m going home

cctinsleybaxter:

Have been reminded that Guy N. Smith is the only horror author i respect

solitarelee:

vaspider:

A Statement on Malicious Email Attacks Against OTW Volunteers | Archive of Our Own

What a cool and normal thing for people to do.

An unknown attacker has been sending our volunteers threatening emails with illegal child sexual abuse material (CSAM), which has been reported to several law enforcement authorities.

In case you can’t parse this, this means that someone (or multiple someones) has been sending CSAM (as in, involving real live children. actual children) to the volunteers at OTW.