I had someone tell me that dislike of Umbridge is usually from ingrained sexism toward female villains. I kind of stared in shock – I mean I love my lady villains. I love nasty female villains. I love sneaky and clever female villains. I love female villains that wrap themselves up in what the patriarchy expects of them and uses those expectations to smash someone upside the head.
I tried to explain my hatred of Umbridge isn’t that she’s full of traditionally feminine attributes.
It’s that she’s lawful evil.
If you did an alignment chart, no one would represent lawful evil more than Umbridge. I don’t think there’s ever been a character that better sums up lawful evil.
And, to me, lawful evil is the most terrifying and disturbing evil there is.
To me, lawful evil is the shit that gets thousands of people killed while the person responsible walks away feeling like they did their duty.
Evil forces like Bellatrix and Voldemort are fairy tales. They’re the bad guys a good guy can chase away with a sword or wand.
Umbridge is that evil that really does lurk in the hearts of men (and women). The realness, the plausibility of it, makes her amazingly uncomfortable.
So, yeah, I can’t get as excited about her as a fantasy book creation as easily as some other female villains. Not because she’s a woman, or because of her gender presentation, but because she represents a sort of evil that’s far, far too close to home.
And people hating Umbridge? Also tends to be a hell of a lot more personal. We’ve all had someone in a position of authority abuse their power at some point or another – I literally cannot think of a single person alive who hasn’t had to deal with that at least once.
Facing down a genocidal maniac who murdered your parents and countless others on a quest for blood purity is…not so common.
A teacher who picks on you because they can? A professor grades you horribly because they don’t like you and makes sure you know it? A boss who ‘accidentally’ loses your requests for time off or makes a point to assign you the jobs everyone hates all the time? These things are a dime a dozen.
here’s a scary post that’s probably going to get me in a lot of trouble.
please understand that i am speaking from experience as best i can and contextualizing those experiences with what i know. please understand that i am not trying to step on anyone’s toes. that doesn’t mean i won’t, but if i do, i am open to discussion and to clarifying anything that i have said poorly.
that said, i want to talk about collateral transmisogyny.
trans women are the targets of transmisogyny, obviously. they’re the reason we need to fix this. most of all GNC/butch/otherwise non conforming trans women, who get shit from every side.
but it leaks. an ideology so simplistic and indiscriminate cannot possibly only hurt its prime target.
we’ve all seen that post about the cis woman getting kicked out of a women’s bathroom. we all understand this.
i have been braced for misplaced but direct transmisogyny since i gave up being a binary trans man and began retransitioning in idk 2014 or whenever it was. my gender now is irrelevant but my presentation fluctuates between butch and femme chick. however, i have a deep voice, facial and body hair, etc.
i haven’t dealt with nearly as much of it as i expected to. i can think of many reasons for that, top of the list I’m Not Actually A Trans Woman, but people on the street don’t automatically know that. i can think of things that might make people think one thing or another but what does anyone gain from this sort of speculation.
anyway, this post was prompted by the fact that my selfies were recently reblogged to a “TV” chaser blog. i don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about any of this. i just realized i was afraid to say it because i am scared to upset anyone which tends to mean someone else probably feels the same, so i have to say it.
i guess i do have something to say. having some similar experiences as a group of people you do not belong to is not appropriation. neither is talking about it, as long as you couch it in language like this that makes it clear that my experiences of collateral transmisogyny are not the same as experiencing it directly because of who you actually are.
to be very clear: i do not claim to share any of the actual experiences of trans women, just that i occasionally take some shit because of shitty attitudes about y’all.
i didn’t want to make this post because i don’t want to hurt, upset, or offend any of the trans women i love dearly or any trans women at all. but i think it still needs to be said. and i hope i’ve done this in a way that isn’t harmful to anyone. if i messed it up, i’ll correct as best i can.
Tbh I think a big issue is how we look at the problem? Like it has been more accepted in feminist spaces to be inclusive to transwomen…. but the current narrative still frames any “alignment” to masculinity as evil.
Like something that really bothers me is how “radfem” got replaced specifically with “terf” (or twerf even) and changed the narrative of bad feminism being specifically about transness and genitals and not that it is shitty to make people jump through hoops to prove themselves.
Like the problem is not genitals. It is one of the aspects of it but not the only one. The actual root issue is the enforcement of a narrow definition of what gender labels mean that excludes people from their chosen label for not fitting properly in the mold.
And this is really not helpful for transwomen because like, if my gnc ciswoman friends are basically experiencing imposter syndrome and I as a nb person am a mess, do people REALLY THINK that every single OTHER way a transwoman might “fail” at womanhood being held up as making someone not a real woman is helping???!?
You didn’t get rid of terfs at all. They just switched from “if you have a dick you aren’t a girl” to “if you don’t preform gender correctly you aren’t a girl”. Like fuck man I legit do not know if I am nb or a girl and probably never will because I have spent my whole life being told I was failing catastrophically at being female. I sit here and watch transwomen abused by ciswomen with identical language and behavior as I used to get trying to be a girl seeing people say it’s transmisogyny. But for some people it’s more failing to conform to gender then transness itself and if people don’t recognize that it goes beyond that they aren’t actually making the spaces safe. Like if you kick out ciswomen for being gender non conforming even if you make specific exceptions for transwomen because they have it harder that just sends the message that if they rock the boat they will lose their Girl Card and be ejected from their own supposed safe spaces built for them. It’s like the whole “you can ship but only to cope!” Turning into harassing people about their health statuses and eventually “we changed our minds we hate you too”. That isn’t real support it’s a damn threat to throw people to the wolves.
Where I’m living now, I was initially pretty surprised when I started running into spillover trasmisogynistic BS. That hadn’t been an issue before.
The difference, AFAICT? A particularly ugly combo of rigid expectations, shitty hypervisibility for trans women, and frankly more than a little xenoracism.
In this particular case, bigots aren’t sure what to think when they encounter some weird foreign AFAB person who is taller with bigger shoulders than a lot of local cis men, and very “wrong” body language because foreign. (Yes, I am also queer and NB, but never even came across as particularly GNC under some rather different cultural standards back home. I never felt like I was expected to actively try to pass as my assigned gender before in anything like the same way.)
So, they jump to the best match explanation they can think of for what type of Social Abomination™ they’re looking at. Which is pretty far off the mark, but they’re totally sincere in the hatefulness.
Like with other spillover transmisogyny? It mostly appals me just how much regular daily scrutiny actual trans women must live under while they’re just trying to go about their business, with so much hostility ready to erupt–and just how entitled these jerks feel to hassle anyone who sets off Possibly Transfeminine alarm bells.
Basically, this shit is too good an indication of just what a huge problem transmisogyny is. That’s what makes me really angry about any of it.
Occasionally getting aggressively sirred, that flavor of street harassment, or the stinkeye from old ladies when I’m trying to pee (where trans people do have actual legal protections, I might add)? Obviously not at all the same as living with that garbage constantly, and under more correct assumptions about what kind of person you are.
But, it’s still frustrating to deal with, and speaks to some way bigger problems. That’s why I will even bring it up, definitely not to suggest that it’s exactly the same experience, much less some type of competition. More than enough shittiness to go around, unfortunately, and it’s all part of the same disgusting social package 😑
so, this is just another step in them getting closer to fucking over students.
I’m sure yall have seen the post about how this bill will over tax graduate students getting a stipend, making it nearly impossible to go to school if you don’t have some alternative form of income [like rich parents anyone??]
So great, they’re just out here pushing as hard as they can to fuck students over as badly as possible
these fuckers dont want yall getting an education unless you’re already rich, these fuckers want to see you dead in the street and that’s ALL this bill shows me honestly.
If this had been implemented when I was a graduate student, I would have had to leave my program. It’s hard enough to do graduate school as a working class person. This bill will make it nearly impossible.
A plan for later, using the leftover brown basmati from yesterday. And subbing some diced zucchini just fried in the pan with the onion for most of the other veggies. Maybe some carrot for variety.
Ought to go pretty well with a leftover piece of garlic and lemon chicken, to round things out some.
Can we talk about the weird way white people treat ancient cultures? They act as if Egyptian culture or Babylonian culture or Ancient Chinese culture somehow universally belong to everyone, they act like the ancient cultures are completely divorced from their modern counterparts. For example, whites have no problem using and recreating the image of Ishtar or Isis, they even buy stolen artifacts from the black market, saying that they “respect” and “love” the ancient culture, but they also have no problem bombing Iraq and literally destroying whatever ancient objects are left, and they show so much disdain for modern-day Egyptians who manage the pyramids and are trying to make a living off of it….it’s disgusting, if you claim to respect our ancient cultures so much, you should at least respect the descendants of these cultures. Those artifacts are OURS not yours.
All my life I’ve heard non-cat people insisting cats don’t love you and just want food but actual scientific testing confirms what anyone with cats already knows, that given the choice they would actually rather see their people first than just eat.
Now if anyone who is so fond of acting superior about “knowing” that cats only show affection to manipulate people into getting them something/doing what they want, would read this…
Also: I’m bothered that the assumption is always that animals are basically fuzzy robots unless proven otherwise by scientists. I don’t think it should take a scientist to understand when someone loves you. It reminds me of how when autistic people say we have empathy, someone always comes along and demands scientific proof. Anyone else can say they have empathy and be believed – even many people who are lying about having empathy, will be believed over autistic people telling the truth about ourselves. Unless we produce scientific evidence. I’m sick of having to produce scientific evidence for my reality, in ordinary discussions with everyday people, who don’t require scientific evidence of each other when making such claims about themselves.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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