Mina Jack Tolu

Sunset Exiles by M.J. Camilleri published by Merlin.

Queer: 0
Cohesion: 5/5
Political: 4/5
Laughter: 3/5
Tears: 4/5

In the first week of May I made up for April and read a Maltese novel (in English).

Sunset Exiles by M.J. Camilleri.

First pages in I didn't think I'd grow fond of an older single male character going on dates... But M.J. worked some magic with his words.

I was crying by the end.

In April I did not read a book in Maltese. Neither did I read a Maltese book.

Today, we woke up to the news that our friend Cemre Nayır was arrested in Turkey, alongside 90 other activists accused of taking part in the organisation of illegal demonstrations.

The right to protest is not a crime.
It’s a cornerstone of a free society.

Read our joint statement with CDN here:

I'm going to keep it light for this month in terms of word count and read the recent translation of Audre Lorde's uses of the erotic, the erotic as power.

Some words learned:
- fonqla. Someone who is hard to please.
- Nugrufun. Soot.
- żagħbil. Idling about.

And some I can't find in online dictionaries: mkagħbrin, agħafa, mmantra.

In March with a spillover into April I read "Sajf" (summer) by Ryan Falzon.

Flow: 4/5
Queer: 0.5/5
Political: 2/5
Story Cohesion: 4/5
Horniness: 5/5

It dragged a bit, like a long summer in Malta with no trips abroad and no plans. Easy to read and follow. A bit of a chore to complete.

The White Lotus, TERFs, and “Autogynephilia” as a Floating Signifier plus their “grand unified theory” of transness

NEW ESSAY! about last week's White Lotus episode & misconceptions about "autogynephilia," but mostly about GC/TERF rhetoric & their "grand unified theory" of transness!
on Substack (no paywall): juliaserano.substack.com/p/the-white-...
or Medium (friend link): juliaserano.medium.com/the-white-lo...

They are just disappearing people off the street. Having a hard time thinking about literally anything else.

An illustration of a referee in a striped shirt holding up their hand with a 4 showing.

I'm going to Innsbruck for the #rollerderby world cup as a skating official. You can help me get there by buying this poster for 15€ + postage via PayPal or Revolut or bank transfer.

While flights there are reasonable, flights back home to Malta are very expensive because of high tourist season

Aphroconfuso ġurnal letterarju bil-Malti

Ħaf, to wander. Huma jħufu, they wander / prowl / go about aimlessly.

I actually encountered this word before in an essay on aphroconfuso.mt and misremembered it as another way to say 'fucking'... But it was actually used as 'cruising' ... In the gay sense. Which explains the misremembering. 🚢

A photo of a book on a bed sheet. The book cover is full of colours and shows a figure walking amongst towers and trees.

I'm going to attempt to read 1 Maltese book a month! Starting February!

This month I read "Din il-ġawhra ta' pajjiżna" (this gem of our country) by Tyrone Grima.

Flow: 4/5 Queer factor: 4/5 Political: 4.5/5 Story Cohesion: 3.5/5
New vocab: ġawhra (gem), għagħa (outcry / rabble), ħaf (to wander).

Screenshot of a duolingo lesson. You are rich because of my rent sir written in Arabic and English.

"you are rich because of my rent sir". Duo Arabic coming in with the good phrases already.

Today I found out that data on a hard drive that went bust 6 years ago is still recoverable. 🎉🎉🎉

Why did I wait this long to find out? That's just how my mind works.

The courage to vote Green The list of candidates for the European Parliament in Malta includes 39 individuals, with 10% more male independent candidates compared to female candidates from political parties. The Green Party's A...

An analysis of the European Parliament elections lists in Malta now that they are complete.

minatolu.com/2024/04/29/t...

On Thursday I will be in a debate with the following candidates:

1. Marija Sara Vella Gafà, PL
2. Daniel Attard, PL
3. Peter Agius, PN
4. Miriana Testaferrata DeNoto, PN
5. Arnold Cassola, independent
6. Ivan Grech Mintoff, ABBA
7. Terrence Portelli, Imperium
8. James Ryder, independent

Who are Malta's 39 MEP candidates? Third of contenders for the June 8 election are independent

Times of Malta has a pretty good round up of who's who in these elections, except for an independent candidate none of us know anything about. timesofmalta.com/article/who-...

In 2019 8 parties presented candidates, this year its 5.

PN, PL and Imperium Ewropa remaining the same.

AD+PD who have merged, after presenting two separate lists in 2019.

Alleanza Bidla Who rebranded to ABBA and started a new party.

Volt are new.

There are more independent candidates, 13 now compared to 5 in 2019. 3 of those who stood in 2019 are standing again.

This will be the main story this election. As we will analyse what this might mean for the final vote in the next month.

Compared to 5 years ago, there are 6 candidates less overall. With the main difference being in PN (10 in 2019), PL (14 in 2019) who are presenting more restricted lists. This might favour them in STV as there would be less division of 1st count votes within their own lists.

There's around 66% of the candidates that I would consider centre-right to extreme-right on a Maltese scale.

On the centre-left to left-wing scale we are considerably fewer.

Amongst the so-called 3rd parties and independents, ADPD remain the biggest party.

Amongst the independent candidates we see most fragmentation of the small right and extreme right wing parties. With former candidates and party members running on their own.

ABBA (EPCM) - 2 candidates (50% women)
ADPD (Greens) - 4 candidates (50% women, 25% non binary)
Imperium Ewropa (Fascists) - 2 candidates
Partit Laburista (PES) - 9 candidates (22% women)
Partit Nazzjonalista (EPP) - 8 candidates (50% women)
Volt - 1 candidate
Independents - 13

We now have the complete list of candidates for the European Parliament in Malta, 39 in total. 13 of them are independent candidates - all men. That's 10% higher than the amount of female candidates from all the political parties.

Good line for Eickhout:

"Four years ago, VdL said that the Green Deal was her Man-on-the-moon moment. Can you imagine JFK coming back four years later and saying 'halfway to the moon is good enough'?"

(Also somewhat unfair to VdL I think, she's not arguing to stop)

A close up photo of three black men at a protest. One of them holds a drum which he is playing, another a cow.

A young black woman reads a speech in front of Parliament in Valletta, Malta.

Photos from today's protest in Ħamrun & Valletta. Undocumented migrants and stateless children marched together to call for stability and long term residence. They're being left in limbo & threatened with deportation. Despite living in Malta for years & decades, paying taxes, learning Maltese.

Screenshot of a 5-star Goodreads review by Gwendolyn Marshall: Florence Ashley is a transfeminine law professor, ethicist, and (as virtually all publicly visible trans folks are forced to be) an activist. Rather than a dry review in the style of an academic journal, I'd like to provide a more personal report. This book aroused me, laid bare my trauma, and rang a bell deep in my soul. I've never felt so seen. Their erotic tales resonated with my own encounters. Their poetry remains with me still, days later. And their analyses? They may very literally change the course of my life.

Ashley's account of the way trauma informs their adoption of the role of bottom in their sexual encounters revealed to me my own, similar journey. Now I have weeks or months of material to work through with my therapist - maybe at the end of it, I'll come out on Top? Their description of their experiences navigating dating, the internalized homophobia of cis men, and our own internalized compulsory heterosexuality have me setting off on another journey of self-discovery, one concerning my sexual orientation. And their brilliant dissection of the ways in which TERF rhetoric and transphobia corrupts even the most self-assured transfemme's sense of self is all-too-familiarly heartbreaking. Many times in reading this book, I had to put it down to sob and hold myself, waiting for the reignited trauma to pass. Unlike other times when old trauma is triggered, however, these episodes feel like healing.

Finally, Ashley's account of what is to be done in their final chapter shook me to my core. As someone who once waved the flag of revolutionary socialism myself, I saw my own loss of hope reflected in Ashley's words. Rather than adopting a nihilism, however, they propose a palliative activism. We cannot save this world, circling the drain as it is. We cannot undo the rampant spread of transphobia, certainly not any time soon, if ever. Captialism has won. What we can do, however, is put our world in hospice and try to alleviate the suffering of our loved ones and our communities as much as possible, bringing some peace and pleasure to those we love, while the world slowly dies around us. This is the ideology I have been looking for. And if we adopt this palliative model, despite the horrors around us, we can imagine our loved ones, and ourselves, happy.

Ashley's influences are clear. References to previous trans writers, gender theorists, and philosophers abound, but they present them and connect them in profound and revolutionary ways. Or palliative ways, perhaps? In sum, this book could change your life. It changed mine.

Another moving book review of Gender/Fucking: The Pleasures and Politics of Living in a Gendered Body, this time by philosopher Gwen Marshall. 🔥

First time someone comments on the poetry peppered through the book, which I find very interesting since I am quite self-conscious about that part!

I was rejected because I told my interviewer I never make mistakes A reader writes: I was rejected from a role for not answering an interview question. I had all the skills they asked for, and the recruiter and hiring

< stefon voice > this Ask A Manager letter has EVERYTHING

Why Are “Gender Critical” Activists So Fond of Gametes? plus my new video “Trans People and Biological Sex: What the Science Says”

...in a companion essay, "Why Are 'Gender Critical' Activists So Fond of Gametes?" I specifically address how gametes also show natural variation & how GC claims re: "what the science says" about gametes is heavily distorted... (no-paywall, please share!)
juliaserano.medium.com/why-are-gend...

i am so fucking tired of telling people that these bans are part of a larger plan to eliminate the right to bodily autonomy for everyone. as soon as they’re done wiping out the transsexuals they’re coming for you next, trust.