Hi! Gentile here, I've been reading your blog and find it very interesting + informative, thank you for being such a good source of information and explaining things so clearly and calmly despite all the nonsense you have to deal with.
I hope it's okay to ask this, since I understand it's a very solemn / sensitive subject. In a few of your posts that mention / discuss the Tetragrammaton, you mention that the knowledge of how to say or pronounce the name has been lost. As far as I understand, Hebrew has a phonemic orthography (ie each grapheme / letter corresponds to a phoneme / elementary sound unit). If that's the case, could one theoretically know how to pronounce the Tetragrammaton from combining the sounds those four letters make according to normal grammar / pronunciation rules, or is it the case that the knowledge of how to pronounce the Tetragrammaton exists independently of the knowledge of how to pronounce the constituent letters? Or is it something to do with how Hebrew orthography / phonology has changed over time, and modern Hebrew phonology wouldn't be accurate to the pronunciation as it would have existed before the fall of the second temple? Or is there a nuance in Hebrew orthography / phonology I'm missing?
I understand of course you wouldn't *want* to say it out loud anyway given how sacred and taboo it is, I suppose I'm just curious at the semantic properties of the knowledge of the pronunciation. (If this ask is inappropriate or offensive, I sincerely apologise and please do not feel obliged to post it / reply to it.)
Hi there, thanks so much for your kind words and happy Friday!
So there’s a few things at play here, because you are right, generally speaking, the Hebrew alphabet is a phonemic orthography which would generally lend itself to being pronounceable even in the absence of unbroken oral teaching (leaving aside theological and cultural boundaries on doing so, for the moment). But there are a few confounding factors:
1) Hebrew, both ancient and modern, doesn’t have vowels in its alphabet. To indicate vowels typically it uses nekudot, but that’s not done in texts meant to be read by fluent adult speakers/readers and Jewish holy texts don’t contain them. So we don’t have hard evidence of what vowels go with the Tetragrammaton’s consonants.
2) Some of the consonants in the Tetragrammaton can be used to indicate the presence of certain vowels, but they don’t always get used that way. So there’s no way to know of their presence specifically indicates those vowels or they’re being used purely as consonants and it’s coincidence.
3) Pronunciation of some vowels and consonants, although it does not seem to have been a substantial shift, has changed over time (and not in uniform ways, because of the diaspora).
So certainly scholars fluent in the various ancient forms of Hebrew can make educated hypotheses, but there are confounding factors. And, of course, because of the theological and cultural restrictions on the speaking/writing of the Tetragrammaton there is no unbroken tradition we can look at to confirm any of those educated guesses. And that’s before we even get to the limited number of Jewish scholars who are even willing to try to discern pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton for religious reasons.
Friendly reminder that when you only talk about high masking and low masking, you throw autistics who can't mask under the bus.
We're not low masking, we DON'T mask.
This makes us no masking. Not low masking.
I’ve been going back and forth on posting anything rebloggable about Eden Knight, because simply posting something feels like…such a non-action. But it’s worse to say nothing at all, and the people who loved her clearly want her story to be known. So I’ll try.
A Saudi trans woman named Eden Knight died by suicide after her parents hired two American “fixers” and a Saudi lawyer to traffic her back to Saudi Arabia and forcibly detransition her. Her loved ones have put together a document about this tragedy in hopes that something can be done:
I feel like the cultural piece of this hasn’t get discussed, and i understand why; I’ve seen plenty of utterly sickening commentary from people who can’t be normal about the idea of a trans Saudi, but I feel I’m in a position to break the silence around this, as being a queer Arab myself, the nuances aren’t lost on me. So I’ll try that too:
Arab culture is patriarchal (like most cultures are), communal, and honor-based, which contributes to many Arab parents wholeheartedly believing that they own their children and that they need to control them to prevent any “dishonorable” behavior, even at the cost of death. This is not unique to Arab culture, and I’m really simplifying here, but this is why honor killings happen, and I think it’s remiss to not name the honor-based violence at play in what happened to Eden. She threatened her family’s honor by not adhering to the gendered role coercively assigned to her, and so they inflicted the conditions that led to her death upon her. And I can guarantee that, had her parents not had the money to hire some of their fellow monsters to destroy their daughter, they’d have recruited extended family to stalk her or found another way instead. Honor culture is self-policing.
It’s also remiss to not name the other forces that killed Eden: transmisogyny in both the United States and Saudi Arabia—the latter obviously being worse than the former, but fleeing to the former DID NOT PROTECT HER, so USAmericans can hold off from being smug about her being Saudi, thanks—and her migrant status. The State, capital-S, and its borders assisted Eden’s parents in this.
We need support networks that can actually help trans people with complex cultural/legal situations like this. We need support networks to prevent honor-based violence, which primarily impacts women and LGBT people of any gender. “Just cut off your parents” isn’t helpful when you’ve been raised to internalize this level of guilt and shame, and it especially isn’t helpful when your parents are willing to find you and abduct you to protect their image. There needs to be SOMETHING to prevent tragedies as horrific as this. I can’t say I have the answers. But there needs to be some understanding of how far this honor shit can go, how it can cross borders, and how even people who have found community outside their abusive families can still be very vulnerable to it.
I’m so sorry, Eden. You deserved the world. Rest in peace.
The best part of worldbuilding is making something that sucks. Magic schools with bullshit rules that don't work. Spaceships that are built stupid. My favourite thing to do is to make an inconvenient world that is full of stupid things for boring reasons, and then putting a character int here and making them live with that.
Hey whump community, if we as a whole could stop incorrectly referring to various whumper characters as "sociopaths" "psychopaths" "bipolar" "narcissists" or any other demonized mental conditions, that would be nice.
If you're going to write a story which seriously takes into account how a mental illness, cluster b disorder, or whatever affects a character (yes, including villains) I'm fine with it so long as you put in your due research.
But if you're going to throw around improper diagnostic terms and slurs for the mentally ill simply to state that a character is "evil" or "abusive" then you are getting yourself blocked no questions asked.
-Abraham ♡♡♡
Help for Lola!
Lola is a Nigerian trans woman who needs safe housing IMMEDIATELY. Her neighborhood is getting more and more dangerous as Nigeria gets more and more homophobic and transphobic, so she has to move. She's had to put her education on hold because of this. She needs funds for both safe housing and also hormones, so we're setting the goal at $1400 USD to help her.
ppl pulling the 'just let people enjoy Wizard Game' are often met with 'JKR funds anti-trans groups!' and that's. entirely true. but doesn't actually go far enough.
like if you're on team Let People Enjoy Wizard Game hey. did you know. that in my city RIGHT NOW JKR is sole funder and key board member of an unregulated private agab-policed rape crisis shelter set up specifically to Own The Transes
and which now sits on several gendered violence prevention boards alongside representatives from the (publicly funded and accountable) existing Rape Crisis Centre, against the staff of which her friends and followers have been involved in a years-long harassment campaign purely and explicitly because they run trans-inclusive support services and bc their CEO is a trans woman of colour.
(my friend works there and the pure volume of transphobic harassment has caused several long standing members of staff to quit. which I'm really fucking angry about bc I would not be here today if the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre hadn't been there to help me)
and that on those boards they're known for supporting increased police harassment and approaches that disproportionately criminalise trans people, unhoused people and sex workers and provably don't positively impact the issue of gendered violence.
what I'm saying is that yes JKR funds anti-trans groups but she is also pretty directly involved in materials worsening conditions for vulnerable people at a local and personal level too!!!! she's running an unregulated crisis shelter out of spite and using that to legitimise her political lobbying!!!!!! fuck you!
when the times get rough and I lose sight of the goal i just. reread “the orange” by wendy cope again & remember. that’s where I’m going folks. sooner or later, whatever it takes.
Anyway remember how some of the very same people who are mad that Scary Trans Woman Politician posted horny genshin impact art of fictional adults because "the art style is often used for lolita works depicting sexualized minors" are also in the same group that were mad that fire emblem's english localization changed Anna's lines to be significantly less sexually provocative because she's literally 11 and that means they weren't able to have their 11 year old wifu in english.
Tldr they're all a bunch of fucking hypocrites.
sorry if youve already talked abt this, i couldnt find much -- as a multigender/genderfluid person, what do i do regarding hormone therapy? my dream appearance changes literally by the hour, some moments i deeply deeply yearn for the effects of hrt & some moments i get scared of it because i dont want anything to change. im sure some of it is just general fear of change but it also is Definitely gender-related a lot of the time .. im really just not sure what to do :[ tips/experiences?
I think the question to keep in mind is what would be the easiest "default" body to have? If there are certain traits that you would want to change on a regular basis, what would make that trait easiest to adjust?
In case that's not making sense, the aspect of my body that I have this question about is my chest. My chest dysphoria/euphoria fluctuates a lot, so sometimes I want boobs and sometimes I really want a flat chest. I'm trying to figure out whether it would be easiest to have a flat chest and use breast forms sometimes, or have boobs and bind sometimes.
Just... ask yourself what would minimize dysphoria and what would make it easiest to maximize euphoria. It's okay if you don't know the answer yet- gender stuff takes time, and there's nothing wrong with being unsure.
As for the general fear of change, I have no idea how to help you there because I'm very much also struggling with that, but I wish you the best of luck.