You can say the desire to be pretty is submission to patriarchal norms. Okay. But it's worth adding that patriarchy pathologizes this in cis and trans women (e.g., "autogynephilia"). Women who know their own value, as it were, are treated as "jezebels" who sexually manipulate men for their own ends.

Also, female beauty was considered important even in the egalitarian and women-dominated societies we know of such as Minoan Crete.

So eh. Let people do what they want.

One of the most pointless conversations in feminism is: "Should a woman want to be pretty?" When obviously, the answer is a woman is allowed to want and be whatever she wants but most women socialized in this culture want to be pretty, yes. And it says absolutely nothing about trans women when we also want to be pretty because we were socialized into femininity just like everyone else.

Texas has a really cheap and easy way of disenfranchising millions of voters and it's called having no automatic or online voter registration and requiring everything be done by paper, by mail, and by hand.

Oh, hey, I think my voter registration FINALLY got unsuspended.

It's also notable that Trump's core of support are non-college educated white men who nonetheless make a lot of money by virtue of exclusive trades or inherited generational wealth. Because "no college" is useless as a class indicator. But these men deeply resent economic competition and cultural changes being driven by educated women, especially Black women.

It's annoying how much of American fascism is conservative white men realizing, 30 years late, that college degrees increase your earning power and women and minorities have planned their lives around this fact whereas they didn't. (And for the record, college educated white men still earn more than everyone else.)

It's also worth noting how much of the student debt crisis is an attempt to artificially suppress the economic benefits of a college education specifically for women and minorities.

You can't be assimilationist and opposed to gender-affirming care for teens for the very obvious reason that most trans people, especially young ones, DON'T CARE about challenging the gender binary. They just want to be themselves, frequently in the most normie way possible.

Young women and queer people are being systematically infantilized and stripped of autonomy by older, white, conservative people who have already stolen the opportunity to own homes, start families, and all the other traditional markers of adulthood.

But they're happy to put little kids to work in factories.

The explicit message being handed down by the powerful is none of us have value except to produce more (white) children and profit for our incompetent, aging overlords.

The recurring theme of this era: Trump can do whatever he wants. Musk and other billionaires can do whatever they want. Israel can do whatever it wants.

But if you're a college freshman who goes to an anti-genocide rally, you can end up expelled and in jail. Even deported, depending on who you are.

Great system.

Being a trans kid without social support or gender-affirming care means you cross a line at some point, usually around puberty, where you realize your whole life is borked and there is no real point to doing anything. You're lucky if you don't feel like everyone hates you.

Transitioning lets you claw some of it back and gives you a reason to go on living, if you can get access to it. The sooner, the better. The later, the worse. But if you're like me, it never stops haunting you.

Odessa, Texas just passed the nation's first complete trans bathroom ban with a bounty lawsuit provision.

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/10/23/odessa-texas-transgender-bathroom-ban/

"Why are we medicalizing children?!" cries the TERF in between complaining about how they're being silenced while published by major media.

I dunno. Why do we treat childhood cancer and diabetes? Why do we treat childhood depression? Why do we take exception to parents abusing their kids in every other way except this?

You know what would have happened if I got gender affirming care as an adolescent? I'd be happier and healthier and blissfully anonymous.

The horror, the horror.

Fascism conceives of us all as belonging to them via a chain of custody: children are their parents' property, women are their father or husband's property, employees are their boss's property, and citizens are the property of the ruling class, which is old, white, wealthy, and male. We are all expected to obey, conform, produce, and reproduce for their benefit until the day we die. We have no lives or identities separate from their desires because we do not own ourselves the way they own us.

"Infant mortality got worse after Roe reversal."

No shit. As much as Republicans demonize third trimester abortions, for example, those only really occur because of severe fetal abnormalities in an otherwise wanted pregnancy. Republicans are forcing people to give birth to dead babies or babies that cannot possibly live. Maternal mortality has also gone way up as a consequence. And all of this was known and deliberate.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/10/23/infant-mortality-rate-dobbs-decision-abortion-bans/

There's always some fascist grifter waiting in the wings to tell them this is all "woke" bullshit, women owe them, queer people are "freaks," and everybody should just do what they're told.

Which obviously doesn't endear them to anyone else.

But you can tell these men they don't have to do this, that they're being manipulated and exploited by mostly rich white men who don't care about them, but as long as they're hooked to the power trip of male dominance, they will keep chasing their own tail.

Even if they realize they've wasted half of their life doing this, it becomes a matter of sunk cost. It pushes some of them over the edge.

And the thing is, many men are deeply insecure because of toxic masculinity. It foists absurd and absurdly high expectations of power, prowess, etc. on them. Women have always known this, and these men know women know this about them, which makes them feel even more insecure about it.

Unfortunately, belligerence and violence, demonstrations of power and dominance, are the only recourse which toxic masculinity provides to cope with these insecurities.

Toxic masculinity and machismo always make a comeback during fascist eras because one of fascism's core principles is the dominant group doesn't have to change or be accommodating or even be happy and healthy, that it's entitled to its power and privilege and anyone who says otherwise is the enemy.

Some men will cling to toxic masculinity and its fascist purveyors even as it makes them miserable because they're convinced they'll get what they "deserve" in the end.

Do people understand how anxious trans people are these days?

Like, my personal advocacy has had to change from "please understand trans people like me" to "please stop helping Nazis who want to murder us, why do you keep doing that?"

The moral panic being pushed by anti-trans activists in the Guardian, the Atlantic, the New York Times, and now by the Trump campaign is fascist propaganda and always has been, and it connects deeply to other white supremacist obsessions like immigration, mass surveillance, police power, economic caste systems, and controlling women and women's reproductive ability.

For liberals to stand back and let them do it with minimal push back is tantamount to complicity.