Spend any length of time in any trans related space and the sexualisation of trans women’s bodies leaks out. Be it the demonisation of trans women’s aesthetics by gender critics, people chasing trans women because they have a sexual proclivity for women with certain genitals, or trans women themselves working through their personal sexualities, the sexualisation of trans women is both overt and subtle due to how society has framed trans female bodies. This has deep historic roots, to the point that when you engage with the history of trans womanhood you are engaging with the sexualisation of those bodies and the fetishes of those who recorded those bodies. This piece examines the hyper sexualisation of trans women, unpacking how the fetishisation of trans bodies has in part caused the backlash against trans women and the rolling back of trans rights.

From childhood, women are trained to restrict their appetite. And there’s a huge, hidden, cognitive price to pay for it

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/41776095

Content Notice

discussions of abuse, sexualized violence, and rape.

I'm guessing that anyone around here who is still using Instagram or one of the mainstream platforms would've seen this. Thought I would share here because I think this is a great idea.

The days when social media seemed to care about things like astroturfing or brigading are in the past. And in the era of bots, this problem is out of control. Online bullying and harassment and swarmed with hate comments is rife, pushing the suicide rate higher. Online groups and spaces exist to target specific people for specific reasons and nothing is done by the lizard brained people running these platforms.

So in order to counter this, a mailing list and / or WhatsApp group has been created to mobilize an army and instead of battling it out with bots in the comment section, giving the bullying victim love and support and rallying around them.

I know that I could do with a cause like this because just fighting bigots all the time poisons you too. You'll likely need accounts on mainstream platforms for this though, if you're interested in taking part.

I read the draft African Charter on Family, Sovereignty and Values the way you read a letter from someone you used to trust. For pages, I was nodding, smiling even. Then I reached my own body on the page, and I understood what the document had done: it had stapled together two tenets of my life that I thought could complement each other, so that to keep one I would have to surrender the other. I always thought my Pan-Africanism gave context and legitimacy to my feminism. This charter disagrees with that.

I am a Pan-Africanist. I am also a feminist. The charter is built so those two cannot share a room.

This is incredibly sad.

Sometimes the most consequential innovations are fueled by frustration. When she was in her early thirties, Ridhi Tariyal asked her gynecologist for a fertility test. Her doctor dismissed the request, saying such a test wasn’t possible. Tariyal knew otherwise. With an MBA from Harvard and a Master of Science in biomedical enterprise from MIT, she was familiar with the Anti-Müllerian Hormone, an established marker of ovarian reserve. The test existed. Still, her doctor would not order it.

The experience left her frustrated enough to turn her own health into a science project. “There are thousands of women like me,” Tariyal, now 45, says. “Women are waiting longer to have children, but they still want information about their reproductive health.”

Regular fertility tests require blood samples, so that raised an obvious question: Where could women collect blood easily and repeatedly without a clinic visit?

The answer, she realized, was hiding in plain sight. Every month, billions of women discard biological material containing blood, immune cells, bacteria and fragments of tissue shed from the uterine lining. According to Taryal, over 800 genes are expressed differently in menstrual effluence and venous blood. Yet, she notes, “We throw all this valuable information into the trash.” What if menstrual blood could reveal fertility, detect disease and provide a window into women’s health, all without invasive procedures?

Women’s health is chronically underfunded, under-researched, and misunderstood – receiving just 2% of private healthcare funds globally. In fact, most clinical trials were not required to include women until a ruling change in 1993. Consequently, the male body has been treated as the default in medical research, despite substantial physical and biological differences between men and women.

Last week’s 62nd session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) was a major historic leap for mothers around the world, in both the developing countries and in advanced economies. Reem Alsalem, Special Rapporteur for Violence against Women and Girls, its Causes and Consequences presented an astoundingly thorough report titled Violence Against Mothers.

Working under a special UN mandate established in 1994 to investigate the root causes and resulting consequences of gender-based violence, as well as propose systemic reforms, Ms. Alsalem’s report covered the manifold forms of overlooked gender-based violence against mothers. In her public statement accompanying her report she said: “Motherhood remains largely undervalued and mischaracterized as a purely private choice rather than a public good. Mothers are subjected to multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination, yet remain unrecognized as a distinct category in law, policy and data.”

Julie Shayne has spent the better part of her teaching career navigating campus politics made complicated by being a woman.

Each semester, she once again finds herself on edge at the beginning of the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies course she teaches. While most of her students have been pleasant, she said she has had to remain cautious of red flags.

“My classes meet a diversity requirement, so I get students in there who don’t want to be in there, or at least initially, they think they don’t want to be in there,” said Shayne, who is a teaching professor at the University of Washington Bothell. “So they’re almost resentful that they’re having to spend time learning something that they think is just political or opinion or however they feel.”

The Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, also known as ARCC, aims to normalize abortion by putting a simple message where drivers can see it – on a billboard at the side of a busy road. Located at the intersection of Wharncliffe and Southdale Road in London, ON, the new 10 X 24 foot billboard proclaims, “Abortion is healthcare.”

Margret Taylor is the social media coordinator for ARCC.

“There’s a coordinated anti-choice presence in terms of advertising,” said Taylor.

Anyone who’s had a graphic anti-choice pamphlet pressed into their hands on a busy urban street knows this is true. Another example of this organized anti-choice campaigning would be the anti-abortion billboards that were once a staple on BC’s Highway 97. This practice only ended when BC Billboards announced in 2025 that it would no longer display billboards about abortion at all – be they anti-choice or pro-choice.

Several years ago, the night before a local election, I was arrested for prostitution outside of a Koreatown motel. The customer who made the appointment with me twirled his wedding ring a lot and made small talk about sex toys. When he stood up, I followed him towards his motel room, which was across a parking lot. Once outside, I was handcuffed and shoved into an unmarked van by the “customer” and another cop, who flashed his shiny gold badge. After a few hours, I was dumped like a stray dog at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles. Unlike many other sex workers who have been routinely rounded up in prostitution stings, I was not misgendered, raped or beaten by cops. But the subordination ritual of the arrest itself, and the feeling of being caught in the jaws of a likely publicity stunt before an Election Day, stuck with me.

A majority of the other women in jail with me that night were half my age and were Black or brown. One of them fell asleep with her head on my lap after she showed me how to use the phone. Then, and now, the LAPD brags about making the city safer, but for sex workers, more arrests only mean more fear, abuse, trauma and poverty. Incarceration only exacerbates these conditions. For sex workers, cleaning up the city means erasure.

Arlie Hochschild coined the term in 1983 to describe a specific workplace cost. Starbucks' Green Apron Service is pushing it further than she imagined

After visiting an island brothel in Bangladesh, the novelist was inspired to write an imagined uprising. She explores the radical fictional worlds where women have the power

Respectfully, no thanks

Elfriede

I am beyond the point in my life
Where I am trying to save
An emotionally unavailable
Avoidant man

The story of the misunderstood, sensitive softboi
The story of the emotionally unavailable man
With fear of intimacy
And commitment issues
Who will eventually reveal their lovable golden core
As old as time
So old
My ears bleed from it
It’s a fairy tale
Cause all they ever reveal themselves to be
Is self-absorbed assholes

You say women never gave you a chance
To open up and be yourself
While all that time
you apparently expected them
to commit to your terms

But
two people
means two terms,
and a women’s terms are no less of importance than yours.

Maybe they waited patiently
Went in
Round and round again
For negotiation
And drove against walls
And eventually decided,
they had seen enough
You had shown them your terms
And respectfully,
They declined

If you don’t want to get to know me
If you are not interested in meaningful conversation
If you are looking for a good time,
laughter, kisses and good fucks
Then please
Let’s just call it like that
And let’s have some uncomplicated sex
Without all the other awkwardness

But also
without you reaping all the care work
All so eagerly
Without reciprocating

Yet, if in general
I am just too much
A burden
Demanding
Intense
You’re repulsed by me
Being an actual subject
A person
With a character
With needs, emotions and boundaries

Then
Better buy yourself
A pocket pussy
And talk to chatGPT
I heard its programmed for empathy and not giving strong counters
I have seen and tried and waited and
I, respectfully, decline.

Published in Harbour #4 Fall 2025