cookie on the phone, he's a phone guy!

You are diseased in understanding and religion.

Come to me, that you may hear something of sound truth.

Do not unjustly eat fish the water has given up,

And do not desire as food the flesh of slaughtered animals,

Or the white milk of mothers who intended its pure draught

for their young, not noble ladies.

And do not grieve the unsuspecting birds by taking eggs;

for injustice is the worst of crimes.

And spare the honey which the bees get industriously

from the flowers of fragrant plants;

For they did not store it that it might belong to others,

Nor did they gather it for bounty and gifts.

I washed my hands of all this; and wish that I

Perceived my way before my hair went gray!

- Abu al-'Ala' al-Ma'arri, c. 1000ad

i don't do celebrity worship but kyary being pregnant helped make my day ♡

the question is less "what is a woman?" and more "what is a gender?"

nbs and gcs seem to agree that gender is a social construct and that it's a pretty stupid one as it stands, but the gc philosophy asks why identity has to be phrased as gender instead of doing away with it entirely. i think that's a really good question. genderfluidity and gender criticism both express, "i'm a person with different facets and moods but i'm always me, regardless of how i look or what i'm doing from one day to the next," but i find that the phrasing of queer theory just allows movement between stereotypes and labels, whereas gender criticism prefers to do that without the labelling and reference to expectations. "i'm a woman when/because i'm feeling feminine," versus "i'm feeling feminine."

the semantic issue that bugs me is that i think it's fine for "woman" to mean "adult human female" but it doesn't ONLY mean that, and i personally think it would be better if "woman" meant "gender assigned to human females," but probably it's better to get people to be a bit more flexible about accepting that sometimes different people use words differently than to try to change meanings for everyone.

but that's the extent to which i agree with gender critical stances. i still really disagree with a lot of the radical feminist analysis and certainly with solutions proposed by several such individuals, i continue to maintain that terfs and queer theory adherents need each other and are two sides of the same worthless coin. but in general i understand the gc worldview a little better and have found a lot of common ground there.

i think the framing as conditional bodily autonomy is inaccurate, i think that it's really about willingness to raise a child under conditions you can't actually control. so the question isn't really what you would do if the prenatal screening gave a certain result, but what would you do if you couldn't have the screening. they're plenty accurate but they're not 100%, and several disabilities and chronic illnesses that people refer to as "too painful to live with" or "too much to be responsible for" can't be screened for in utero or are even acquired later through illness or injury. and i think that prospective parents owe it to themselves to take that into account. my bet wasn't on the odds my child would ever be disabled or chronically ill, but on whether we'd manage if that happened.

so when i say that you can choose whether to have kids, with whom, when, and to some extent even how, but you can't choose which kids to have, i'm not talking about legislation, i'm talking about literal ability to decide what your kid will be, and impossibility of predicting the future, and assessing whether you're really willing to get ready for whatever happens in your family.

i've noticed a couple of things i thought were worth mentioning while browsing - not scouring but browsing - some radfem blogs recently. first, none of the ones i've seen are even alluding to essentialism, rather they're pretty vocally naming it and opposing it, to the effect of, "i have ovaries and they do not dictate my preferences, roles, culture, abilities, etc." the other is that they're also pretty vocal about trauma from men in a way that doesn't match the racists saying that "despite making up 13% of the population" as i've frequently compared. now i do still think it's poor analysis and winds up stopping thinking there, because i do think it leaves out some crucial questions about policing and reporting and a bit of a wider picture about dv at least. my point is that they lay on references to personal experience and trauma which the racist rhetoric i see on social media does not, so that is one angle of the comparison that doesn't hold a lot of water and i need to rephrase and elaborate if i'm going to argue.