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M. E. O'Brien

@genderhorizon.com

author. towards trans communist futures. Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto, 2023) and Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022). Editor at Pinko

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M. E. O'Brien@genderhorizon.com · 22h ago

Fighting for and winning the right to free movement of all people is fundamental to any chance survival of our species and our world. Borders will increasingly mean extermination, genocide and treating people as expendable

Melissa Gira Grant@melissagiragrant.com · yesterday

“Here’s a radical thought: what if migration is only a problem to those who want it to be? What if we started seeing the mass movement of people less as an existential threat and more as a simple inevitability of human existence?”

M. E. O'Brien@genderhorizon.com · yesterday

The cheapness of disposability has all sorts of dire consequences for ecological sustainability, working class consumption and the quality of our material worlds. We’ve built a society made of junk, and making something else will take a very different way of organizing work and wages

M. E. O'Brien@genderhorizon.com · yesterday

Every year I have my nice boots repaired, and every time it costs at least 30 percent more than a new pair of cheap boots. Boots theory ignores the global automation of manufacturing and the rising organic composition of capital. It isn’t true anymore. Disposability is very cheap

M. E. O'Brien@genderhorizon.com · yesterday

Every year I have my nice boots repaired, and every time it costs at least 30 percent more than a new pair of cheap boots. Boots theory ignores the global automation of manufacturing and the rising organic composition of capital. It isn’t true anymore. Disposability is very cheap

Dr. Cara Berg Powers@clbergpowers.bsky.social · yesterday

Today's bsky argument about "boots theory" seems to come down, from my perspective, to 2 different ideas of what it says- (1) believe that poor people could make better choices to save themselves out of poverty (2) believe that poverty enacts worse choices, creating cycles of more instability.

Gillian Branstetter@gbbranstetter.bsky.social · 2d ago

"It’s unbelievable to subject kids to these kinds of invasive medical exams that have no basis in health or safety. One of my daughters is a rising fourth-grader, and she played a sport last year. Are you going to ask a fourth-grader to undergo this?” s/o @momsrising.org

The Push to Force Genital Exams on Student Athletes

In just a few months, Washington could become the first state to require sex-verification tests for girls playing sports in K–12 schools.

thecut.com

Gillian Branstetter@gbbranstetter.bsky.social · 2d ago

An initiative on the ballot in Washington state in November would require all athletes seeking to play girl's sports from kindergarten to high school to undergo "genetic screening, a testosterone-levels test, or an examination of their reproductive anatomy" before they can play

The Campaign to Force Genital Exams on Girl Athletes Soon Washington State could require sex-verification tests for those playing sports in schools. Portrait of Andrea González-Ramírez By Andrea González-Ramírez, a senior writer for The Cut who covers systems of power. Those physicals, Maria explains, are usually perfunctory: “Like, Are you walking normally? Are you lightheaded? I have never had to take any clothes off. I’ve never felt uncomfortable or violated.” If IL26-638 were to pass and Maria were still in school, she says she would likely drop out of her team. (We’re withholding Maria’s real name to protect her privacy.) “I honestly don’t know if I would be able to do these tests,” she adds. “It would also make me question, If I do it, are all my teammates going to too? Or would I just play with the three or four girls who are willing to or have access to do it?”
wishda@wishda.bsky.social · 5d ago

The DSA in Wilmingotn, N.C. has created a "crisis" by putting benches at city bus stops, after literal decades of the city promising and failing to do so.

Democratic Socialists’ bus benches remain, city mum on next steps | Port City Daily

WILMINGTON — The handmade bus benches installed by the Wilmington Democratic Socialists of America have highlighted a problem nearly everyone agrees exists: most Wave bus stops have nowhere for riders...

portcitydaily.com

Laura@tutusntinyhats.bsky.social · 4d ago

Exciting news: When We Win: Dispatches from Revolutionary Futures edited by @emanabdelhadi.bsky.social and @genderhorizon.com is now available for preorder! portersquarebooks.com/book/9798888...

When We Win: Dispatches from Revolutionary Futures

Revelatory short stories from astute political thinkers that unveil radical visions of futures transformed by collective struggles for liberation This collection envisions a multitude of futures where today's freedom struggles have overcome oppression and capitalism and formed new revolutionary societies. Here, fiction authors, revolutionary theorists, and movement intellectuals take readers into liberated worlds, wresting the future from the cruelty of the state, private property, and profit. Inspired by the liberatory horizons that have emerged in mass movements from recent history, When We Win imagines complex futures of disability justice, sexual and gender freedom, communization, and radical democracy. The stories describe decolonized possibilities, detailing how life after revolution might sound, taste, smell, feel, and look. The future, we insist, is ours to craft. WIth stories by Eman Abdelhadi Ama Josephine Budge Alireza Doostdar Anand Gopal Daniel Sarah Karasik Sophie Lewis Mimi Lok M. E. O'Brien Vicky Osterwiel Jordy Rosenberg

portersquarebooks.com

Gillian Branstetter@gbbranstetter.bsky.social · 5d ago

El Sayed: "When it comes to trans rights, this is the right to get the health care that you need...It’s the right not to be discriminated against by your government because of who you are. Because what tends to happen is they come for theirs, then they come for yours"

The idea that we can assent to the taking away of anybody’s rights, and think that somehow the government won’t come for all of our rights, is itself the problem. And, look, I don’t need people to understand how they use their rights. I just need people to agree that the government shouldn’t be able to take any of our rights. I put my face on the ground thirty-four times a day, David. Most people don’t understand why I do it. I don’t need them to understand. I just want to have the right to do it. And when people decide that they want to take away my right to do that, I’ve got a problem.Now, I hope that everybody’s going to show up and say, No, no, no. You can’t stop that person or that community from reflecting and praying as they choose. Similarly, when it comes to trans rights, this is the right to get the health care that you need. That’s really what it comes down to. It’s the right to be who you are. It’s the right not to be discriminated against by your government because of who you are. Because what tends to happen is they come for theirs, then they come for yours, then they come for theirs. And at some point you live in a society where rights are negotiable, and that is not the America I was born in. It’s not the America I know and love. It’s not the America I’m going to allow somebody like Donald Trump to give us.
Aren Aizura@incommensurati.bsky.social · 5d ago

Do not use Minneapolis organizers as the peaceful good example so you can smear the Prairieland defendants for their “violent” tactics. Alex Pretti was also armed. The MN 15 are being indicted for related tactics and strategy. So much is wrong with this piece, but that especially sticks in my craw.

Screenshot of text: The Prairieland activists decided to meet the administration on the field the administration picked and deliver them the fight the administration wanted. By contrast the ordinary citizens of Minneapolis, and their resolute nonviolence, even in the face of brutal murders committed by agents of the state, have done far more to change national opinion on the mass deportation machine. They chose not to give the administration the fight it wanted. They met physical force with soul force, as Dr. King put it. Forget about the morality. The tactic was effective.
Liberal Currents@liberalcurrents.com · 5d ago

"Their actions ensured that they struggled to achieve sympathetic media coverage outside of a few left-wing outlets, struggled to attract material or legal support (the ACLU, for instance, refused to touch the case), and failed to achieve positive virality in the larger culture."

Sophie Lewis@reproutopia.bsky.social · 6d ago

This is what it looks like when a society has settled the question of who counts as rapeable – which is to say, who counts as human. It also makes clear who has protection from sexual violence under the law and who has the government backing to commit it.

Sophie Lewis@reproutopia.bsky.social · 6d ago

A patriarchy-only account of rape cannot metabolize this fact. An account of rape as a technology of colonial rule absorbs it easily – which by no means precludes us from understanding these machineries, staffed by women as they often are, as themselves inextricable from patriarchal domination.

Sophie Lewis@reproutopia.bsky.social · 6d ago

The New York Times has stood by "Screams Without Words" without addressing the discrepancies. Unproven allegations hardened into justifications – because the case for annihilating Gaza never actually rested on the quantity or quality of evidence, but on the colonial monopoly on credibility.

Sophie Lewis@reproutopia.bsky.social · 6d ago

Sexual violence is not incidental to the colonial project. It is its grammar. The many official reports on sexually tortured Palestinians are not aberrations. They document a system – recorded and cross-corroborated by the very organizations Israel’s defenders routinely cite when it suits them.

Sophie Lewis@reproutopia.bsky.social · 6d ago

"Much of the escalation no longer requires secrecy – it is photographed, filmed, and disseminated by its own perpetrators, turning the thousands of members of Israeli society who daily consume and share the footage into co-participants." www.thekeymagazine.com/p/israel-rap...

“Everything Is Legitimate”: How Israel Uses Rape as a Tool of Genocide

The rape of Palestinian detainees is so commonplace that it’s no longer hidden. It’s filmed, joked about, and celebrated in parliament. This is no mistake; it’s core to Israel’s colonial project.

thekeymagazine.com

Sophie Lewis@reproutopia.bsky.social · 6d ago

I have a major piece up today at The Key. It's about Israel, parsing the rape baked into Zionism's core grammar. I speak of trained dogs; Screams Without Words; Sde Teiman; the Tomer-Yerushalmi affair; and the Palestinian Feminist Collective on sexual violence's centrality to reproductive genocide.