was telling kid that birch is generally accepted as an European substitute for Japanese oak for bokutō swords, having similar softwood properties of denting without splintering and resisting breaking on impact etc. kid asked, what about Brazilian woods?

I said I don't know—lots of people made ipê swords but ipê is one of the "ironwoods", super hard, meaning it will shatter and will shatter badly, so it's in the same category as ebony, beautiful wooden swords that are for swinging alone but not for fighting. and I said if I wanted to look up good woods maybe I would check what were historical woods for tacapes/bordunas—heavy clubs used by various different indigenous peoples in the Amazon and Atlantic, many of them suspiciously sword-shaped.

turns out it's actually quite hard to find out reliable info on what premodern tacapes were made of (a common difficulty with indigenous things), but I found on Parellada 2017 that the Xetá from my home state used "alecrim" wood for weapons, which was surprising for me because I only know the word as the Portuguese for "rosemary" (from the Arabic, إِكْلِيل, more like "crown" or "garland"). thought I myself didn't know that, the word is also used for a couple different native trees, and I think Parellada means Holocalyx balansae aka alecrim-de-campinas, Guanari: ybyra-pepe. According to Remade it's a dense wood good for billiard clubs and tool handles, so it fits
https://www.remade.com.br/madeiras-exoticas/324/madeiras-brasileiras-e-exoticas/alecrim

(the Xetá/Héta are a Tupian folk that the farmer colonisers genocided all the way down to 8 survivors in the barbaric, remote historical past of the 1950s).

> At the Paraná Museum, the 9 bordunas, "aura haimbé", are oar-shaped in alecrim, with length varying between 78 to 135cm,, width 16 to 23cm, with the widest part hardened with hot coals. The wooden surface was polished with ipê bark, ash and water, giving it a rusty brown tint (Fernandes, 1959, 1961; Kozák et al., 1981). Kozák documented narratives, later illustrated, of these bordunas used for fighting. The handle could be used in daily life to grind jerivá fruit or pound meat meal...

other sources say that the oar shape—BDSM people would surely call this a paddle—is specific to the Xetá, and was used as a sort of multi-tool; you could dig roots with it, or hit against trees for percussion communication, etc.

how the fuck did we decide to gatekeep hormones because of some sports league bullshit

genuine bullshit

#Autistic folks: I'm doing a survey on which #AutisticPride flags people like most! There are over 50 flags people have proposed for this purpose, and I'm asking you to rate them 1-5: https://forms.gle/eU2Co1sktTWGMrFVA

No questions are mandatory, so if you get tired, just hit submit! 💜

Non-autistic people may fill in the survey also but I ask you only do so if you know why I excluded flags with puzzle pieces & blue for autism.

#ActuallyAutistic #PrideFlags #Vexillology #DisabilityPride

Looking for quotes about preventing bullying, and yeah, most of these put responsibility on bully victims. Not on the bully, and not on society.

Absolutely disgusting.

#AbuseCulture

so, in honor of International Non-Binary People's Day, let's talk about AGAB and its relation to non-binary genders.

one of the most striking - and, to my knowledge, under-reported - statistics to come out of the 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey was the fact that, in the American transgender community, there are nearly four times as many AFAB people who identify as non-binary as there are AMAB people. (source: https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/2024-02/2022%20USTS%20Early%20Insights%20Report_FINAL.pdf)

now, under normal circumstances, we would expect the number of AFAB and AMAB enbies to be roughly the same - at most, maybe there might be a statistical difference falling within the margin of error.

but that's a HUGE shortfall that falls along the lines of gender assigned at birth.

so, what might explain that shortfall? well, I have a couple of guesses based on the statistics, and a couple more based on personal experiences and anecdata.

1) there's a full ten percentage points' difference between binary transgender women (35%) and binary transgender men (25%). this gap suggests to me that AMAB transgender people are pushed into identifying as binary transgender women. (there's also the competing possibility that binary transgender men are pushed into identifying as non-binary, but I find that argument less convincing. I'll get to exactly why later.)

2) the percentage of AFAB transgender people (55%) is significantly more than the number of AMAB transgender people (43%). this suggests that there's something pressuring AMAB non-binary people, specifically, to remain in the closet - or, perhaps, that there's something driving AMAB non-binary people away from transgender communities, or shaming us for identifying as transgender.

3) anecdotally - both cis society, and queer communities, typically tolerate variance in gender expression more in AFAB people than in AMAB people. the reason for this gap in tolerance is male supremacy and femmephobia - a "man" shirking their "superior" masculinity for "inferior" femininity is more likely to be seen as a fetishist or predator than a "woman" seeking to dabble in the "superior" gender expression. this lack of tolerance is undoubtedly keeping a great many AMAB trans people, both binary and enby, in the closet.

4) anecdotally - queer communities in particular are far more likely to gender AFAB enbies correctly than AMAB enbies. I personally get misgendered as "woman"/"trans woman" so many times by queer folks of all stripes on fedi that I literally had to put "I am not a trans woman" in my bio. this trend may pressure transfem enbies into identifying as binary trans women simply because queer communities don't consistently recognize AMAB enby identities.

5) anecdotally - queer communities are more likely to see non-binary identities as an endpoint for AFAB folks, and as a stepping stone to trans womanhood for AMAB folks. as much as I like to joke about the "pronoun pipeline" among transfems (and I probably shouldn't so much), transfeminine communities in particular typically see non-binaryhood as a waypoint on the journey from "cis man" to trans woman. (and besides that, my own experience - he/him "cis guy" to she/her trans woman to she/they enby - completely shirks that supposed pipeline.)

"so, Rachel," you're probably saying to yourself at this point. "are you going to come back to that point about trans men being pressured into enbyhood?" well, I don't want to deny that there might be some of that going on - I don't know.

and also, even if we're to assume that we should be seeing roughly the same percentages of binary trans woman and trans men in the American trans community, even if we're to assume that the entire shortfall in percentage between the two were entirely AFAB enbies being pressured out of trans manhood (and I don't think that's the case to be clear, among other reasons because that'd be a pretty damn enbyphobic assumption), then that still leaves a pretty gigantic gulf between the number of AMAB and AFAB enbies. and that also doesn't explain why there's so many more AFAB trans people than AMAB trans people as a whole represented on the survey.

so, to sum things up: if you take anything away from this post, it's that there cannot truly be any sort of justice in queer and trans communities until we recognize that institutional community discrimination against AMAB trans people - not just trans women, but also transfem enbies and non-transfem AMAB enbies - is real, impactful, widespread, and largely unacknowledged, to the point where it's pressuring AMAB enbies into either the closet or binary trans womanhood.

and that's why today, International Non-Binary People's Day, is especially important to us AMAB enby folks.

we're here, we exist, and we won't be shoved into one box or another.