• they/she

wondering poet, codeweaver. systems have souls; souls have systems.

<3 @effinvicta


mcc
@mcc

Joseph Ratzinger, the guy the Catholic church gave the title "Pope Benedict XVI", died yesterday. There's one thing I'll always remember Mr. Ratzinger for, his 2012 Christmas address. This was his final Christmas address, and since he did voluntarily retire he probably knew it would be so at the time. He decided to use this last precious opportunity to speak out against what he apparently viewed as the biggest and most pressing danger in the world, which was… transgenderism, and tolerance of transgenderism, which he called "gender ideology". The resulting tirade was bad-faith, eliminationist, and contains many intellectual errors from misreading Simone de Beauvoir on up, but I'll always remember it for this one accidentally incredible paragraph, in which Mr. Ratzinger attempts to summarize the position of his enemies (i.e.,us); and accidentally manages to make trans people seem both heroic and incredibly metal:

The words of the creation account: “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female – hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be.

I do not think I could have written a more inspiring declaration for transhumanism, or rationalism, or my own inherent dignity if I had tried. For this, Mr. Ratzinger, thank you.


millenomi
@millenomi

that 'gender ideology' isn't just Pope Nazi's thing, it has been a constant cathofascist refrain in Italian and European politics for a long time (where the cathofascist and hard right have both been very keen on turning themselves into "the default", and thus can get away freely with 'ideology' as a pejorative for anything but the hard right status quo).

They're also using the word 'gender' in English, which is something that obviously does not translate, to indicate foreignness and thus alienness. (A thing that I see anglophone people being very blind to is that a lot of people have to import English and international terms to refer to themselves because that's the language of empire, and the one language where Western-resonant queer culture has been able to define itself in the last twenty years. The entire right seizes on this and marries it with protectionist isolationism in decrying queerness as a 'foreign' phenomenon.✶)

Please be careful with European politics. Especially Italy; there are actual avowed fascists in power there right now.

(✶ When I speak of myself in Italian I purposefully use non-wide-use, grammatically correct calques instead of English import terms because of this. I'm "transgenere", "non binariə", not "transgender" or "non-binary", even if other people use these terms for themselves.)


one last edit: I hope none of you has forgotten Pope Francis's comparing of trans people to nukes — which retreads and affirms much of the same arguments as his predecessor Pope Nazi. To be trans in Italy is to live in a place where the discourse is stuck in the late '80s, and the law earlier than that (it still uses standards from '73, including forced sterilization, and does not have provisions for updating from WPATH; I have done a full gender transition and the law will not recognize that as sufficient to change my ID, and even if I could, changing your ID changes your SSN equivalent, which is your primary key into all things tax related, including your identification to the government, inheritance, and dependency/obligation records in anagraphics — aka, the family registry. Change name, become an unperson.)


ireneista
@ireneista

as always it is super important for the queer community to tell and retell this history, to help bring younger people up to speed and to make sure we know how to fight effectively. thank you @mcc and @millenomi for your very detailed accounts, there was plenty of stuff in it we didn't know.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @mcc's post:

in reply to @millenomi's post:

I have no delusions about past or present popes, even when they occasionally might say something that might out of context be construed to be minimally supportive, and it either comes with a gotcha if you read the whole thing or just look at the church being one of the largest sources of genocide globally… ever… and continuing to support the organization that refuses to acknowledge that is just damning to me