MechanizedPossum [she/her]

my gal pal just came across some synthesizer-related issue that’s so weird i can’t even name it without potentially doxxing myself, and the first thing she thought of was asking me about it, and not only could i explain to her what was going on there, but had actually looked into that particular eurorack module doing all that weird shit in the past.

i don’t think i’ve ever felt so understood than when i’m with her, she’s such a treasure and it’s so much fun being weird and gay with her. t4t will save your soul.

badism- worseism

finally a correct simulation of us bourgeois democracy

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Keine Tankies oder Glorifizierung von „sozialistischen“ Diktaturen.

All the mistakes of Weimar era SPD antifascism. The first time as tragedy, the second time as LARP.

Yeah, i feel that. I mean, i lack the experience from a PoC standpoint because i’m painfully alman, but i notice mysogyny and transphobia in leftist circles a lot, although that’s not universally the case. When i talk to younger comrades, they are pretty damn good on the intersectionality thing from my personal experience, but older white cis dudes are often slow on the uptake when it comes to these things.

Feel free to DM me, but i likely won’t be much help when it comes to organizing due to opsec reasons, all the orgs i have contact with are local and i don’t want to disclose where i live. Still glad to help out with general info.

That’s actually what they do. Or they blame the unemployed for being too boorish and uneducated and voting nazi (even though the main target demographic for both historical and contemporary fascists in Germany are petit bourgeoise and class collaborationist workers scared of losing wealth and status).

Queer liberation in bourgeois democracies has largely been thanks to grassroots movements that had a big societal impact owed to to queer communities being at the cutting edge of pop culture and queer activism being loud, radical and relentless. These movements until this day struggle against the opposition of well-funded, deeply entrenched, officially endorsed reactionary forces. Due to this materially powerful, hostile forces, advances were often restricted to select legal fields like gay marriage, while areas that have an economic impact like protection from workplace and housing discrimination or encompassing trans healthcare are in many nations lackluster and incomplete until today.

Queer liberation in AES was in many ways the opposite of that, being enacted top-down by decree. There was input by party members from queer communities, by clinical experts ect., but ultimately anything hinged on whether the party wanted to support this cause or not. At the same time, tho, reactionary forces (the churches, activist billionaires) were actively suppressed and did not have any political influence, removing a major factor for state-endorsed and institutional queerphobia.

This lead to drastically different outcomes in practice. In many western countries, queer acceptance among the populace has vastly outpaced our legal (and in many cases where it is relevant) medical acceptance. The people are ahead of the reactionary insitutions here. In many AES countries like Eastern Germany or Czechoslovakian SSR, the institutions were ahead of the people, legalizing homosexuality before western countries did while the public was less accepting of gay people than in the bourgeois states were gay sex was still treated as a crime and fought with police raids on gay bars. A tightly regulated public life led to less cultural impact of queer subculture in many places, with few exceptions like Slovenia (which still under Tito hosted Europe’s first queer film festival and until this day is the most gay-friendly country in Eastern Europe).

These are fundamentally different situations stemming from fundamentally different institutional frameworks for activism. East Germany outpaced West Germany when it came to the legalization of gay sex and the legal recognition of trans people. The “reunification”, or rather: the annexation of the DDR by hostile capitalist and reactionary forces, led to tangible legal setbacks for East German queers - the DDR legalized homosexuality a year earlier and unlike the West, did not retain different ages of consent for gay and straight sex, for example. So when the wall came down, there were suddenly teenage gay couples that were at least in theory threatened with persecution because the West German legal system still operated under the idea that homosexuality spread as a form of social contagion, through seduction of youths by older men. This reactionary and unscientific view lead to a higher age of consent for gay sex until 1994. Trans people were able to change their papers and access treatment on a case by case basis in the DDR, which often led to easier transitions than in the West, were either bottom surgery or sterilization was required until 2011 if you wanted to change your name and gender marker. But East Germany’s public was measurably less accepting of queer people than the public in the west, and outside Berlin is less welcoming to queer people until this day. Where every major West German city had a bustling and open gay nightlife in the early 1970s, East Berlin had its first official gay bar in the late 1980s. Yes, it was a state-run gay bar, i get how cool that sounds, but having a lively, vibrant queer scene requires a kind of organizing that is … difficult if all has to happen within your country’s socialist unity party.

It is overly simplistic to draw statements like “gay people were better off in country x than in country y” from this, such comparisons even today disregard the complexity of the opression we face. How do you rank the fact that Thailand is socially more accepting of trans people than most Western countries, but makes it flat out impossible to have our actual gender legally recognized, meaning that trans women in Thailand routinely and automatically end up in men’s prisons? You can’t put a number on that and say “Thailand ranks as place number so and so on trans rights and Canada ranks as place number so and so.” It doesn’t work. The details aren’t comensurable. And this also goes for comparing gay rights in AES and Western countries.

I know this is a thorny and complicated topic, we’re all used to libs using 1950s soviet laws as an example to hallucinate a supposed inherent homophobia of communism when the UK at the same time chemically castrated Alan Turing and drove him to suicide, or when the US routinely raided gay bars back then and did human experimentation on conversion therapy. It is infuriating how liberals completely memory hole the brutality of our opression in the West due to them having suddenyl forgotten about their own homophobia ten years ago. I hate to see that kind of person act all smug. Fuck that. But let’s not paint a nostalgic and idealized idea of the DDR’s gay bars, this will not enable us to take a Marxist, scientific approach and learn and do better than earlier socialists.

What we see in examples like Cuba can be seen as a learning from other AES states’ history. They did not just pass their new family code, they accompanied it with a widespread agitprop campaign, they ensured that they got the public on board with their plans. And then they backed it up with tangible, material benefits where needed, such as in trans healthcare, were they are training more surgeons than required for the Cuban trans population so they will help trans people from all over LatAm lead a dignified, happy life. And they make sure that queer culture is adequately represented in Havanna’s nightlife, that there’s pride parades etc. This is a good approach under socialism, and it requires a lot of acceptance and openness from the upper ranks of the party to work out.

When you tell capitalists that facism is the most brutal and chauvinist elements of the bourgeoisie trying to uphold capitalism in crisis by open violence, their only suggestion for effective antifascim is

Be grateful the very idea of “Germany” wasn’t razed to the ground and scattered to the wind after your dear leader escorted himself off the premises.

As a German, i’m actually kinda pissed at the allies for missing that historic opportunity.

cinephiles

A more proper term for connoisseurs refined enough to fully appreciate the Œuvre of auteur filmmakers like monsieur Diesél is actually cineáste.

oligatory new type of bottom surgery just dropped comment

pls stop trying to get me back into ironic heterosexuality

Yes, this was most likely deliberate. Since the days of the old sub, this community was a thinly veiled front for the bidet lobby (aka Big Buttwasher), and as we all know, not having poop on your butt is a Maoist thing.

Germans didn’t just try to colonize it, but genocided hundreds of thousands of people there and the best agricultural land is still owned by settlers until this day and demanded as restitutions by the descendents of the genocide survivors, which may or may not be a reason why German think tanks are running anti-postcolonialism psyops.

TIL not having a doodoo ass makes you an ultra

Self-labeling should always be foundational to these things. As queer people, we all come from communities that have a history of having had taxonomy forced upon us, of being treated as specimens labeled by outside authorities for the purpose of control and stigmatization, of having been denied the very ability to express our experiences in our own words, something that continues in the present day with don’t say gay bills and the like, and that makes it so important that we have agency over how we’re referred to.

Turns out that rule is still less widely known then you and me had assumed. The folks i’m talking about aren’t some terfy boomer lesbians, either, they’re all trans and mostly nonbinary themselves, and usually in one or several t4t relationships and actually younger than me. Like, the absolute last people you’d expect that from.

It’s more complex than that shitpost of mine would make you assume, though, i was not being 100% serious there. Some people have a different perspective on this because unlike me, they do not want to be included under the lesbian label. Like, one of the people i had that discussion with is part of a system / plurality with differently gendered personalities making up that system. So if they’d date a lesbian, said lesbian could actually be faced with the situation that the person that is, as they call it, “at the front” at a given moment is one of their male personalities, and that obviously has led them to the understandable conclusion that they can only date bi / pan people, because anybody else would not be able to love all of them. Yes, i know, this already breaks the “non-man” definition, but at that point of the discussion, we hadn’t arrived at bringing that one out.

And in general, that’s really something many people can forget with the non-men loving non-man definition of lesbian, there’s a lot of NB people who do not want to be included under “people a 100% lesbian person is attracted to” because reading them as tomboys or butch women is such a core part of their experiences with misgendering and with having their identity and validity called into doubt. As a nonbinary trans woman, my perspective on this is from fighting for inclusion in the community and being confronted with transphobic and enbiephobic gatekeeping, but a lof of AFAB nonbinary people have good reasons to feel as invalidated when a lesbian is interested in them as i would feel invalidated when a gay man suggests that he could date me, and with their amount of passing being as it is, they get into that kind of situation more than once and that just fucks with people.

Shit’s complicated, because an umbrella term like nonbinary necessarily includes people with experiences and needs that are vastly different from each other.

Autism is when hats.

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