akemi > Recent Status Updates

Reading neuroscience next to trauma lit is interesting, because brain plasticity is celebrated as the physiological mechanism of learning, yet it's also the reason people get trapped in traumatic scripts, defaulting to what's protected them in the past, even as it wrecks their life in the present. Traumas that fire together, wire together. It's so much easier to reinforce habits than break them.

Mad respect for this therapist. There's a section where she straight up says some of us will never heal fully, our lives are too chaotic, fragile, disabled. It's a tiny paragraph, but absolutely fucking affirming to those failed by this world. She ends with but we gotta keep trying anyway. It's both really grounded and sweet.

Really fucking glad this book pushes against the IFS dogma that there is a capable self in all of us just waiting to self-heal dysfunction. This simply isn't true for trauma victims, who have not been taught how to regulate arousal, self-soothe, process emotions, articulate attachment wounds, mentalise other minds. We all have the capacity to develop a self, but it's something mutually constructed through the other.

Heh, internal family systems sees personality disorders as parts in a dysfunctional whole. I like reclaiming terms like borderline and narcissist, but IFS's rejection of total pathology makes sense. I've always hated the introvert/extrovert binary, because my sociality is dependent on who I'm with and how I feel. It's much the same with personality disorders. The field primes certain parts to emerge.

fragility is far more dangerous than stupidity. it's what milquetoast liberals miss when they see reactionaries as stupid, and therefore themselves as rational, level, and objective, the petty narcissism of humanism. but fragility makes the privileged clamp down in the face of facts, counter discourses, calls for accountability. they're not stupid, they're terrified, and terror breeds rigidity, dismissal & cruelty.

The blindspots of neuroscientists are crazy. This guy gives great empirical evidence of babies having an understanding of object coherence, deductive reasoning, and number theory, gives a speculative account of what's going on behind the curtain, then doesn't connect them together at all. He just keeps repeating all this happens in the brain, because all he's analysing are brain scans. What the heck??

I've been helping and homing people illegally evicted and seeking refuge from abuse and transphobia, while tutoring two gender studies papers which is too much for one disabled bean. The inhuman power of landlords to kill those they don't want to deal with is fucking revolting.

I have two seminars planned for 2026, on intersex science/activism and decolonial/nonbinary genders, so expect book updates soon~

"To be happy and well adjusted is a false ideal in many life circumstances. When the wealthiest 20 per cent of the world's people use 86 per cent of the goods, and earn 74 times the income of the poorest 20 per cent, it may be that those who are worried, anxious, sleepless, or depressed are having the most compassionate, healthy, and realistic responses."

the romans sure love punishing rape victims and women in general and people who have been wronged by another person

they would have welcomed neoliberalism with open arms .-.

the god of all gods is an omniscient pervert who uses his all-seeing powers to rape vulnerable women, and the goddess of all goddesses is a tough on crime victim blaming reactionary who punishes the raped for their victimhood.

an immaculate depiction of the criminal justice system.

hello friends, i am misusing this goodreads feature just 2 inform u that i have uploaded a trans theology lecture i did onto my yt which u can access thru my profile's linktree! i go thru nonbinary and genderfluid depictions of cosmic beings across 1400 yrs of history (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

if u want more updates like this, follow my insta. sorry for the promotional bs, everything will return to normal, ayoooo~

One of the first stories in this is about a fuckboy so repulsive that their victim would rather be a tree.

Men!! Listen up!

I've been sick for nearly a month straight without sick leave, and while I thought it was due to Covid tanking my immune system, it's more likely the fact that I haven't been heating my room for fear of having no money left for food. The greatest crimes of the rich are those never designated as crimes in the first place.

Love this. Jules is going hard refuting some trans studies classics on how they fall into transphobic narratives of the 'newness' of trans. We don't need medical recognition to exist. Invisibility does not mean inexistence, just a narrow way of seeing transness. As queer historians are apt to say: we have always been here.

"Intersexuals have realized that, like straight women and gay people, they need not be treated as fundamentally unacceptable or flawed—that it is not their bodies that make their lives difficult, but the cultural demands forced upon their bodies."

Medical experts were soo trapped in heteronormativity, that they believed hermaphroditic traits (such as lactating breasts on 'men') could have arisen from deviant sexual practices. That homosexuality could physically invert one's body to become more feminine or masculine, than one's 'true sex'. What binary sex does to a mf—revert back to medieval ontology. These guys were pulling at straws their entire careers, huh?

Oh man, this is a breath of fresh air. I've been enjoying Alice's book on hermaphroditism, but you can tell she's an outsider merely fascinated by the construction of intersex by medical men. Jules' is fucking angry. She's outraged at how reactionaries have captured the narrative of trans children, pushing them to suicide, bullied and murdered at the hands of others. She's fucking integral.

Janice Raymond incited so much transmisogyny in the radical feminist community, which was once inclusive of transwomen, that a bunch of terfs called The Gorgons stormed a festival Sandy Stone was at, with fucking guns, ready to kill her. This is apparently the kind of feminism terfs think we need to go back to. Storming queer music festivals to kill transwomen we've never met. Fucking insane incel shooter shit.

This is so funny. Medical men kept trying to locate true sex but every body part they turned to kept producing ambiguous, nonbinary expressions. The more they looked at gonads, the more indiscernible ovaries and testes appeared to one another. The more they looked at semen and mensuration, the more cases of men menstruating and women ejaculating appeared. They just couldn't find a stable referent to fix sex to.

The more medical men examined a patient of 'doubtful sex', the more uncertain their consensus became, because science ascribing to cisgendered assumptions simply couldn't place intersex patients. Their blindspot was the assumption that 'true sex' was binary, easily partitioned into two gendered roles, with concomitant heterosexual desires. Hence their mutilation of children who were surgery alerted to be 'natural'.

So, there's a form of hermaphroditism where someone born with XY chromosomes lacks androgen receptors. Unable to respond to testosterone, their body develops into the feminine ideal, looking more woman-like than XX women, who do have androgen receptors. In other words, intersex can appear *more* binary sexed than binary sex, completely rupturing sex dimorphism as a normal or coherent principle of organising sex.

starting to think this is the tragedy of being so cucked by doctrine that you believe god killing tens of thousands of sinners by drowning while leaving two alive is a great act of benevolence

when the great battle happens, ur getting it first adam, u milquetoast genocide apologist!!

god is a 'good' slave owner with a cult of paternalism and satan is an incel populist striving for libertarian revolt

this is a far weirder take on the fall than i ever thought it would be

aaaaaa, i can already tell this is going to be a bop

nunneries weren't a place of repression, but relative freedom, because they permitted escape from patriarchy (forced marriage, physical and emotional abuse, domestic duties, rape, and life threatening pregnancies)

we see celibacy and virginity as deeply conservative rhetorics today, but they were *life saving* to medieval women

omg why is satan an incel obsessing over god's new relationship with adam? 😭 is this really the anti-hero people identified with??

big titty goth mommy jesus is certainly a vibe to pair with chaste afterlife virgin bride mary

this is rough. an intersex child is gaslit and force femmed by her mother, and a transboy is outed to his bf who he'd been seeing while passing as a girl. there's even a character who deals with disability, body normativity and shame.

yet, there're also heartwarming scenes of allyship, advocacy, and acceptance.

still can't believe this was written in 2004. such a complex depiction of gender and sexuality in manga.

Slowly making my way to Caliban and the Witch n.n)/ 🐍🪬🌕

There's a medieval mad max mf called Sergius XL in this book.

"As in the instance of Sergius XL, whose ordination corresponded to his wife's consecration as deaconess, the transition from wife to sister is formulaic and goes without saying."

White people are amazing; I wish they were real.

Really ahead of its time. There're a few manga in the 90s that have trans characters in them (who are humanised), but this one, published in 2003, goes extensively into intersex and transitioning (genitals, hormones, physiology, puberty, surgery, gender). While some ideas are outdated (there is a male mind and a female mind) I'm blown away by its capacity to unify nonbinary, trans, and intersex experiences.