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anarchozoe.bsky.social
Historian of political thought. Trans woman (she/her). Author of Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States. For all my work see https://linktr.ee/zoebaker
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I wish all trans people had the freedom to decide to pass as cis or not, to be visibly trans or not. Within a transphobic society the need to be safe means for a lot of people there's only one option: going stealth mode.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

“If a senior academic is valuable to the university because they hold a lot of research grants bringing in a lot of money, Cambridge won’t touch them,” he added. “If there is a grievance, it will be discarded.” www.theguardian.com/education/20...

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

As a child I (trans woman) played sports with the girls at school because my physical disability meant I couldn't play rugby. Wild to think that today if the same thing happened due to my gender it would have been a moral panic about men invading women's spaces.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Liberals and state socialists keep calling anarchism childish. I wasn't aware that most five year olds had such well thought out positions on social theory, the history of capitalism and the state, worker self-management, revolutionary strategy etc.

submitted 5 days ago • 4 comments

Losing my mind reading about the history of sexism in science. In the 19th century men used the second law of thermodynamics to argue that women should be excluded from school/work because they cannot be heathy, labour, and menstruate at the same time.

submitted 6 days ago • 5 comments

I dislike it when people use anarchist participation in the state during the Spanish rev to justify anarchists joining the Ukrainian army. Joining state institutions is a break with anarchism then and now. It logically could be the correct decision but that doesn't mean it's an anarchist one.

submitted 7 days ago • 11 comments

Watching Elon Musk suck at path of exile 2 has healed my soul. www.yahoo.com/entertainmen...

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

I think humans can do better than an economic system in which the actions of one ruler can wreck the entire global economy.

submitted 9 days ago • 7 comments

Charles Darwin was an incredible scientist. He was also very sexist. . . Source: Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex Volume II (Princeton University Press, 1981), p327.

submitted 12 days ago • 6 comments

If this doesn't radicalize the American people, I don't know what will www.theguardian.com/business/202...

submitted 13 days ago • 2 comments

In the 19th century sexist pseudoscience and racist pseudoscience were interconnected. Source: Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Harvard University Press, 1989), p28.

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

My guilty pleasure is reading evolutionary psychologists move from the correct premise that 'evolution shaped the brain' to incredible claims like 'women love shopping because they evolved to be gatherers. Women can't stop gathering shoes'.

submitted 14 days ago • 11 comments

A necessary condition for patriarchy being abolished is men treating women differently. At the scale of billions of people this will only happen due to a set of interlocking factors that form a feedback loop eg increased social costs for engaging in abuse or greater financial independence of women

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

Old anime hits different: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA1w...

submitted 15 days ago • 2 comments

This quote is used as evidence that Emma Goldman supported trans rights. I'd argue it's ambiguous because at the time gender was still a synonym for sex. The sex/gender distinction wasn't really a thing yet. Differences in sex were used to explain homosexuality such that it was a variation of gender

submitted 19 days ago • 3 comments

Finally on the waiting list for an adhd assessment. Hope I'll eventually be given amphetamines so I can go super saiyan and unlock the full power of autism.

submitted 20 days ago • 3 comments

The state violence that Trump is inflicting is an extension of the war on terror and the war on drugs. It is, at the same time, similar to the kinds of violence inflicted by foreign regimes that were propped up by the American government. American fascism will be American imperialism turned inward.

submitted 21 days ago • 2 comments

My fav terrible 1960s theory of what causes trans women to exist: they were raised by an excessively loving mother who hugged them too much. The result is that they are unable to distinguish between themselves and their mother, such that her body and femininity becomes part of their gender identity

submitted 21 days ago • 6 comments

The UK government is now using massive fines to ensure that transphobia is allowed at university under the guise of protecting free speech. The surreal part of this for me is that the guy pushing it forward is Arif Ahmed, my former metaphysics lecturer. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

Small domino: ranking people in an elaborate tier list based on how many intersecting structures oppress them. Big domino: people laundering misogyny as progressive sounding by adding the words white, cis, middle class, or het before woman.

submitted 21 days ago • 1 comment

The guy who coined the English term transexual in 1949 also thought that trans people engage "in such practices as seduction, parasitism, violation of the social codes in numerous ways, frequently kleptomania and actual thievery, pathological lying, and other criminal and unsocial tendencies".

submitted 22 days ago • 3 comments

Babe are you ok? You've barely touched your penguin 1992 edition of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 2.

submitted 23 days ago • 1 comment

My history of how the category of being transgender arose is slowly getting written. Am finding it remarkable that in sources from the 1800s and onwards trans people keep describing themselves in the same way. The only thing that changes substantially is how medical professionals describe them.

submitted 23 days ago • 1 comment

Don't ever form a parasocial relationship with a politician. They're not going to save us. We have to save ourselves by taking direct action outside of and against the state:

submitted 23 days ago • 2 comments

It's a mistake to hope that institutions like distant elections or the current legal system will stop Trump. These are, or rest on, the very institutions that Trump is actively undermining, eroding and destroying at a very rapid pace. Mass direct action needs to happen fast before it's too late.

submitted 24 days ago • 1 comment

The DSM criteria for autism reads like a list of features that are noticeable to a neurotypical observer, rather than a good picture of what it's like to internally experience eg what a psychologist would call my rigid thinking patterns I'd call having principles I try to consistently apply.

submitted 24 days ago • 2 comments

People who critique self diagnosis for neurodiversity overestimate how thorough a formal diagnosis is. I just listed experiences I already knew met the DSM criteria and then talked to a psychologist for an hour who agreed that my symptoms were giving autism.

submitted 24 days ago • 9 comments

I think about this book cover every day

submitted 25 days ago • 2 comments

Find it funny that most cosy games consist in running a small business, one of the most stressful things a person can do.

submitted 25 days ago • 3 comments

One of the negative impacts of AI companies screwing over artists is that it's led people to frame intellectual property rights as progressive, rather than a terrible institution based on state violence that protects corporate monopolies, stifles innovation, and stops the spread of knowledge.

submitted 26 days ago • 4 comments

The claim that libraries are an alternative to libgen is ridiculous. Almost all libraries don't have expensive academic books. Libgen is the university library of the world, open to everyone regardless of wealth, location, or academic credentials.

submitted 27 days ago • 8 comments

Libgen is amazing for the simple reason that it makes knowledge and culture freely available to everyone.

submitted 27 days ago • 1 comment

When talking about biological sex I think it's important to distinguish between social construction and social mediation. Something is socially constructed if it only exists due to people's actions and the relations between them. This doesn't mean it's fake. It means we make it real eg football.

submitted 27 days ago • 1 comment