Uh… I hate to tell you this but people absolutely dress as mermaids and do conventions… There’s a whole home industry of people who make custom silicon tails.

https://aquamermaid.com/blogs/news/mermaid-convention?srsltid=AfmBOoofN82kC8kQ_774E8rKcE1-Mi9CBZXEfvIqLckEK1cq7bXWHFum

https://www.themernation.com/silicone-tail

Nope, different nerd culture entirely. Seriously, they have their own conventions, instead of fursuits they do custom silicone tails and train to swim in them, have contests and pagents and things. There’s basically no overlap between the two communities. Scaleys are folk in the fursuit community who do dragon and lizard personas.

I have odd connections. Being in the film industry I have friends through props depts who do furry cons and one of my coworkers does underwater photography for people in the Mermaid subculture.

Wow… The Incellionare speaks.

You see but here’s where how you’re putting this works together with other things. You are looking at trans people on the whole as a safety issue to the population at large. The framing of trans people on the right always places us as a problem l. That is an outright dehumanizing tactic and the answer is always left kind of purposefully vague because the answer is “we aren’t supposed to exist.”

The outcome of all this discussion is basically to raise the hurdles of being trans in a pubic space. To be frank, they know that basically making life miserable enough for us will solve their “problems” because when life gets too hard and devoid of joy and relief death becomes viable.

So they frame us as a public safety problem, a categorical problem, a mental health problem, a medical problem, a “ruining your fun” problem, a freedom of speech problem because they know every time they do so that you will think of us as a group a little less in terms of being people and a little more as a sacrifice that deserves what we get.

It doesn’t matter that prisons don’t change their design to fit us because as long as we’re the ones getting raped the system is fine.

It doesn’t matter that public toilets don’t change their design to make everyone safer as long as we never go out in public long enough to use one.

It doesn’t matter that basically it only takes six months to dial in what your dosage of hrt and from then on it’s just a prescription like every other you pick up monthly for any other medical condition . As long as we’re interpreted by the system as an ‘undue medical burden’ we can basically just allow stress to ruin our bodies so we die faster and voters can feel like they’ve saved resources.

It doesn’t matter that we have kids of our own because us “not being safe to be around children” means that we are banished from parental and teaching spaces and the child protection services can be empowered to take our children away to raise them “safely” .

The arguements that never frame systemic solutions that include trans people are paving the way for our genocide. They are designed to get you to stop thinking right before you ever consider us worthy of accomodation. You are supposed to look at us as taking YOUR resources away, making YOUR spaces less safe, ruining YOUR culture so that you feel unsafe and attacked even when those things aren’t actually happening. This effect is called creating a “Moral exclusion” and it is the first steps to creating outcast sections of society who you are not supposed to question where they SHOULD exist because you are primed to only think about them as in terms of where they should NOT exist.

There is good reason why we do not soothe your fears about evil creepy cis men in women’s bathrooms. Because it’s bad faith rhetoric designed to give us no recourse to argue that we should have as much a right to be safe. The fact is the numbers are in. In the ten plus years in my city where trans inclusion is the norm there has been no uptick in stalking incidents regarding bathroom use. Just because you are being engineered to feel less safe by politicians doesn’t mean you actually are less safe but you are making US less safe. But that’s not a problem because you aren’t supposed to value our safety or comfort even a little. Your not caring is useful to specific people so they are going to keep training you to do that and to never ask where the trans people went. Because unless you have the misfortune of being one of us or loving one of us enough to care we are just a problem.

Honestly depends on your state and institution and overall is incredibly vibes based. Like depending on the state the system might be on the hook to allow a bottom surgery… But whether or not you “fit the requirements” won’t be determined until after the fact. If the people running the system are anti-trans you will be lucky as a post op trans person to be allowed horomones at all. There’s documented situations of trans women basically entering a sort of menopausal state and having their horomones witheld indefinitely by wardens basically because there isn’t a lot of oversight or consequences for doing so.

It’s also taken as kind of a given that sexual assault of trans people is just a thing that is accepted as a cost of doing business. This is something actually that Trans men stuck in women’s prisons also report as a common experience. The system as it is designed raises the risk for a lot of trans women in prisons seeking transition because if you get bottom surgery and you are denied transfer your sexual assault chances skyrocket to “expectedly matter of course” .

So while the 15 people who have made it all are fully medically transitioned, fully sterilized and been on hrt for longer than the required time for athletes the answer regarding requirements is generally “at the pleasure of the administrations in question which is most often not at all”

Honestly a lot of it is just that trans people entered the popular consciousness and as the conversation started becoming mainstream a bunch of the already shit folks decided to capitalize on the deficit of people’s understanding on the topic to smear and discredit progressive spaces as a whole.

It’s all very vibes based on their side. They took a topic that has a lot of nuance and flattened it to take advantage of a view of the world that invents problems that feel true.

Like “There are trans rapists in women’s prisons”… Out of the current 5000 trans people incarcerated in the US only 15 of them are currently in prisons that match their gender identity. The transition requirements are so high that there is no guarantee that being on estrogen for 10 years, full sterilization and bottom surgery is enough for a trans woman to meet the requirements.

Or

“Our lost lesbian sisters are getting sterilized in mass transitions to become trans men”… When hysterectomy isn’t even a common gender affirming choice. Testosterone tends to halt menses so a lot of the time trans guys who want biological kids particularly can and do keep the bits and detransition (which just means a change in transition status not a full conversion to cisness) temporarily to meet that life goal if they see fit. Basically having fertility is a matter of going of testosterone for a couple of months.

But who is going to actually check this stuff. They know people won’t.

Huh… I had no idea my partner of 15 years was quietly slinging above the pornstar mean. This is what you get when you are an ace trans masc guy who never dated around and doesn’t watch porn…

Sitting on this embarrassment of riches all this time and never knew! (pun absolutely intended).

Same!

I think I am hardly a mover and shaker politically aside from showing up to town councils a few times a year and doing some union safety and advocacy stuff and occasionally hyping Raven Trust. It’s a weird place to be because with indigenous issues you want to be kind of tasked with something to do or at least have a signoff that what you are doing is helping but if you don’t belong to those groups you really don’t want to recommend any courses of action? I mostly do a lot more LGBTQIA+ related stuff because that is my wheelhouse. A couple buddies of mine are way more personally impactful in their work regarding Indigenous advocacy because they operate inside more exclusive power strucrures. I think I am kind of the layabout.

I think one of the most nerve wracking things on the indigenous front I ever did was run a D&D one shot for the former National Chief of Canada. Like I have done a lot of thinking on the implicit colonialist history of the game and the implicit bias wherein that reinforce that mindset through mechanics… But it’s one thing to know that intellectually and another one entirely to pick through your homebrew materials with a fine tooth comb looking for fault.

I also feel like there is no silly in acedemia. Stories tell us a lot about a culture and picking things apart can tell us a lot about psychology, culture or philosophy. Like RPGs they have mechanics that inform the tale though everyone interprets those mechanics differently and sometimes they aren’t really there to “say” anything. Sometimes there is no moral of the story you’re just being invited to have fun. Like Star Wars I think is one of those. Like the Jedi give the veneer of mysticism but I don’t think their internal logic is meant to be extrapolated out to be the author’s world veiw. I think they are basically just a warrior stoic fantasy… But there are thousands of acedemic papers on Star Wars. Every student who goes through the system is there to demonstrate they can think and dissect thought using the current methodology. It creates a body of convention which then they might use to pointed effect in their own work one day. The process refines and changes the process which in turn alters the process and the cycle goes on. It’s fascinating.

If you are into podcasts I might recommend “Revisionist History” “Invisabilia” “Radiolab” and the like for wonky dives into minutia and seeing stories from interesting angles. On YouTube I recommend the trans philosophy suite of Philosophy Tube, Shanspere, Kat Blaque and Alexander Aliva, the history and lit stuff with Crash Course, Extra History, Kaz Rowe, J Draper… I wish I had more indigenous forward stuff to offer but I tend to get a lot of that through books or personal connections willing to talk shop. The book “The Red Deal” was pretty evocative but also at odds with a lot of the things that we tend to have going on with local efforts. The books deal with efforts to make society at large run less on a western colonialist mindset but through a more combative nature. Like you can lock horns with the government as the book more suggests … Or you can just change the dominant culture at ground level to normalize forms of reconciliation and restorative justice and work inside those systems indiginizing and hybridizing the structures. Like there’s surprisingly little stopping my union department meetings or say public library management from adopting a restorative justice circle model for arbitration. Anyhow I hope that list of things has some fun stuff on it for you!

I mean I am having a blast writing a novel here. This has been one of the funnest interactions I have had on one of these platforms in years. I came from a family that couldn’t afford to put me through a philosophy or literature based degree and had to be more practical about vocational training for the job that would feel more fulfilling because I didn’t want a job in acedemia. I have way too much ADHD for that. Still I imbibe to a god awful number of podcasts and books on the subject and pick the brains of my buddies who did go to school mercilessly. My sibling actually wrote their dissertation for their Masters on dystopias in science fiction and became a librarian and got a lot of benefit telling me about the major points as a way to codify their own understanding. It has been requested that if they ever display a desire to go for their PHD that I should smack them… But I secretly hope they do.

I love Dune particularly as an example because it’s got a lot all of these weird neat sticky points that intersect with the field of indigenous philosophy and unpacking colonialism which has become a personal interest. I would shake your hand if I could button masher. This has been a good time!

I don’t really have the issue of using power over others. At some level Hierarchy is efficient which is why a lot of Democratic structures have in built heirachy to address speedy action…

But there’s more nuance in what’s going on in Dune. Fremen are kind of Bedouin / Islamic / Haudenosaunee confederation coded. On the one hand you have the tropes around the Confederacy, fierce warrior culture, connecting to the land, noble Democratic society and then you have the Islamic religious belief system represented in the cult of Paul basically becoming something analogous to the Prophet Muhammad. Both of the cultural trope bodies come from places that have dealt with Colonial occupation. There are aspects we are meant to see as noble and admirable. We see through Paul’s eyes as he witnesses injustices and gains an appreciation of the culture which adopts him. There is a long history in the west of Romantization of indigenous peoples. Benevolent racism is still racism though. We follow Paul so we see as he does but the narrative framework doesn’t always match what Paul does. His ability to understand the grand weight of his actions puts him beyond normal human senses of scope. When he behaves in ways based on personal sentimentality Prescience essentially pops up in the corner of the screen and says “The world will Remember this.”

The frame always pops back up to tell us that by sympathizing Paul is going to cause a massive war. He is the fulcrum which the universe balances on and it is his choice whether he causes a massacre of incredible proportions. He’s coded as morally principled- A good man maybe but also the narritive paints weak, unable and unwilling to stop the rising tide because his alliegences are ultimately to the indigenous peoples. He cannot get ahead of the war because the people beneath him of that indigenous culture will never be satisfied with peaceful emancipation but enact instead a holy war. Others must suffer for the Fremen of Dune to be self determining. The deaths of billions rests on the nessisary exploitation of Dune’s spice resources the same way the world relies on oil. The deaths of billions is always cast as the inevitable consequence which is the main problem I think.

Take this back to it’s roots and you see some of the regular pushback you see against civil rights movements. The idea that people fighting for rights or emancipation are instead just looking to turn around and subjugate others. That it must enevitably come down to a war where someone replaces the old form of subjugation with a new format. The jihad is this idea codified. Paul’s actions are often framed as ultimately bad in the story but he fills the role of the person both enchanted by and betrayed by romanitic exotisism.

The story seems to be of someone who sympathizes with indigenous plight but also legitimizes the need for it. Paul is a tragic figure because he is given no third option. The story isn’t interested in exploring any positive potential outcomes. It’s a seesaw where the pain always lands on someone not in reasonable concessions but all or nothing battles. This is where the idea of Dune being an anti-colonization narrative starts to get very shakey.

I don’t know if this was a struggle internal to the author that he was working through in real time as he wrote it, , if we are supposed to see the points of both Paul and the Framework as legitimate or if we are ultimately supposed to conclude that Paul was ultimately misguided… Of those two options both are problematic in multiple ways. In the Framework and Paul are right model you have essentially “what’s done is done” Colonial apologism. If Paul is ultimately supposed to misguided by sentiment that’s basically the plot saying “Do not sympathize it will only lead to the bad stuff happening”. The Fremen can never be stopped from worshipping Paul as saviour and moral guide and the resulting massacre is his reward.

This narrative ignores the idea there are a range of different potential options to deconstructed colonization which are based on different peaceful reconciliation measures that are admittedly less narratively interesting than a winner takes all war. These are based on the appeals to seeing pluralist takes where compromise and actual respect is the work of non-romantic empathy. Different places are currently handling it differently…but that’s not really what Dune seems to consider. It’s structured so that at all times you know as a reader for certain that Paul’s actions and particularly his bleeding heart sentiments will cause death on a scale far beyond Arrakis. It seems mired with ruminations more in line with Utilitarian ethics trolley problem situations which paints Paul as an ultimately divisive figure. The main issue is that it’s using themes of indigenous emancipation to ask these questions which have fairly direct and poorly concealed real world counterparts. Precience exists to force the framework as emancipation as only choosing who is ultimately the worthiest of violence or what is ultimately worth sacrificing because of personal sentimental attachments.

I dunno if it’s nessisarily subverting the Foreign messiah trope either particularly.

In parable there’s a lot of overlap with the white messionic saviour trope just the indigenous peoples are obscured by sci-fi. The Fremen are depicted sort of as braves of the “noble savage” variety having an innate connection to the land in the form of their connections to sandworms, walking without rhythm etc and are visually othered blue by spice. Paul learns things about himself by their adoption and ultimately rises up through their ranks to lead them, takes a concubine in their ranks who represents his “love” but ultimately marries and legitimizes his connection to an offworld Princess. The Muslim/Islamic coding doesn’t particularly help matters. The whole Sandworm thing is coded to bring to mind oil drilling. Uplifting the Fremen society is also not without consequence - doing so is destined to perpetuate a massive out of control religiously motivated slaughter across the universe… Which is not so great. Smacks a little of replacement narratives which puts emancipation always at someone’s expense of being just replaced on a heirachy. Even the names Atraidies is Greek coded and Harkonnen is ripped from Finnish making the houses kind of White coded, particularly since the whole “Western Civilization” thing is often coded as the legacy of the Greeks and Romans (its part of why important government buildings basically are built to resemble faux Greek temples).

Paul also gets his powers basically from a Eugenics based breeding program which more or less legitimizes that process.

So while many look at Dune as a subversion of colonial tropes the framework that paints Paul as a devisive figure also sort of hinges on this idea of him being a good spirited race traitor who manages to become more Fremen than the Fremen whose fall from grace inevitably sparks the downfall and replacement of the (Western coded) civilization he comes from killing billions…

I recognize generally the instinct is to go with the kindest spirited read about these things which I can’t slam anyone for. I don’t think good faith readings aren’t nessisarily a moral failure, it’s human to want to extend the benefit of the doubt, it’s just critique is evolving to see things more pluristically. People like what they like and this particular author isn’t exactly reaping any benefits of influence, he died almost 40 years ago. People are gunna reintegrate his work to try and adapt it to modern attitudes just like they do with things like Tarzan, Lovecraft and Dances with Wolves. There is however a kernel of supremacy in the work, unwittingly placed or not (I haven’t looked into the personal deets of the author’s beliefs and maybe it’s better that way) that is a product of the compounding and normalization of other like works that we are growing up to see weren’t particularly good for everyone.

Maybe however my particularly harsh read is an extrapolation of my own background. I am a West Coast Canadian. We are encouraging ourselves as a society to have a really hard think about indigenous affairs and attitudes. Like its pretty normal where I am for all events, meetings and performances to be preceeded by a Land Acknowledgement and a lot of my friends in acedemia and the arts world are actively trying to fully subvert, credit or recognize and append this stuff so we can start dismantling the structures we’re all unwittingly complicit in. I have buddies from the States who are pretty leftist who are just entirely mystified by the depth and breadth of the process. Yet I am no angel. I love the Anno series of video games which very uncritically depicts a very sanitized version European expansion and capitalist Empire. I watch and enjoy anime that routinely has aspects which are often ridiculously sexist in treating women more like beloved pets than people. I think Miyazaki was right about anime while still enjoying the fruits of that industry. So I am not gunna say “We should spurn Dune once and for all!” but like… I also think we can learn from it and not let it entirely off the hook.

I feel like that’s a pretty well thought out theoretical! Will admit to still not having seen the new Dune movie so mostly going by the book.

I don’t know if I explicitly ever read into Dune that particular “Dark Side” interpretation of the Duel before as since it is so solidly from Paul’s perspective it seemed to be painted in terms of something nessisary to survive further and thus more like a morally neutral painted thing. A loss of innocence for sure but not nessisarily any more so than other fantasy protagonist who took the same sort of step of killing for the first time. He wasn’t granted much autonomy to completely peaceful exit the situation by Jamis so his options were more or less try and kill or cement his one likely route to survival. With the “locking in fate” thing painting his choice to die in the duel rather than kill as maybe for the greater good for nebulous wibbly wobbly timey wimey reasons.

It almost felt to me since the books were so bloody weird with plot points shooting the moon (though after awhile more like jumping the shark in personal opinion) and the factor of such grand prescience weakened a lot of the moral picture of any grand themes of Paul becoming an absolute monster as he’s got such a solid “greater good” he’s working towards that doesn’t really have theoreticals?

Like okay, Paul sees literally everything that will happen from the arrayed options so his demise is always placed as being stopping a series of dominoes from falling by plucking the first one to fall out of the lineup… but those grand losses are almost always impersonal. He at the same time is a human with human desires for personal safety for him and his loved ones which doesn’t place him as nessisarily “bad” just kind of instinctively alive. The plot always frames this as ultimately selfish but really only from the perspective of having a complete and total knowledge of how everything single action is going to eventually play out. It’s eclipsing human moral frameworks by this bizzare aspect of sizing it up to a Godlike scale. Paul can make a “good choice” as essentially a God working on that scale of knowledge or a “bad choice” as singular human with a bias towards survival. While an interesting hypothetical I think that removes him strictly from the territory as being at all relatable on a moral scale to a conventional ethical paradigm. Like for all Paul’s prescience he is limited in his ability to affect the board state so a lot of what happens is painted as his fault because of a choice he makes but if you look at the choices made where he really sort of fucks the dog on a God-like scale it’s generally for reasons which make him relatable as a person.

Absolute power corrupting absolutely or later themes that people really need to not think too collectively and not create cults stikes me as not being Paul’s downside. He didn’t ask for the power he has to be dropped into his lap and can never fully get ahead of the consequences of having that power so I don’t think Paul is painted as being a complete subversion of being a self insert turned bad guy so much as being a " tragic hero Chosen One" just being a hell on earth situation that he needs to weather with highs and personal lows. The framing sort of struck me as a fairly typical compounding trauma storyline where all the terrible things that happen to him make him more “heroic”.

This is all sort of personal opinion though. I feel like I don’t exactly love the Dune universe. My reading of them was largely because while I was staying in Japanese guesthouses I tended to read whatever English novels were left behind by previous occupants.

I would say Dune (at least the first book before it goes really fucking weird) has a sort of anti-colonial, indigenous(ish) peoples under occupation themes that Star Wars just isn’t interested in exploring. With Star Wars it’s basically just “There’s an evil empire, okay that’s enough, let’s go” vibes to OG Star Wars. Like you don’t have to pay attention to the political background blurb at the beginning that serves as pasting a veneer of political intrigue at all and the story basically makes sense. It’s a War story, whether or not a Monarchy is involved barely matters. It could be “Ambassador Leia” and “President Palpatine” and basically nothing would functionally change. Empire requires no monarchs to function.

Dune does come across as “The Indigenous peoples of Dune hadn’t a hope until this one random outsider self insert character showed up and joined their cause and was amazing at everything and was lifted up as saviour because vague prophecy seeded by generations of matriarchal Jedi (Bene Gesserit) manipulation reasons…” It’s sympathetic to indigenous peoples in a vaguely problematic for a host of familiar reasons kind of way. Like the world building is great and all but I feel like you could swap Luke Skywalker and Paul Atreidies and end up with a generally better story on both counts.

Doesn’t look feverish…