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Ron

@ronkilljoy.bsky.social

Yvonne O’Dell 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 (they/them/theirs) PhD researcher @archanchistleic, sometimes poet, archaeological theory enthusiast, dogkin, and plant pal ✨

Posts Replies Media

Ron @ronkilljoy.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

Always alarming when hierarchy is deemed “natural” (psssssst - it’s constructed and changeable) Is it time to whip out my fave Le Guin quote again?

A photo of Ursula Le Guin accompanied by the text, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.
Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

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Ron @ronkilljoy.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

I talk/dream/practise/read a lot about hope as a way to imagine myself into a liveable future. This current timeline certainly makes it challenging. I’ve been stuck on hard mode but it’s my first time playing the game, and ya know? I’m tired. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

‘Tis but a scratch says the black knight, whose arm has been cut off. Scene from Monty python and the holy grail.

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Ron @ronkilljoy.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

12/12

[1] This Year by the Mountain Goats
[2] I’m talking about our nationally beloved, Russell Prize winning, well-meaning and transphobic, sorry, I meant “concerned” childrens’ author.
[3] Goodier, M. 2023. Hate Crimes Against Transgender People Hit Record High in England and Wales. Theguardian.com; StopHateUK, 2024. About Hate Crime: Transgender hate. Stophateuk.org.uk.
[4] Mermaids Press, 2019. Exclusive: Mermaids’ research into newspaper coverage on trans issues. Mermaidsuk.org.uk.
[5] Montiel-McCann, C. 2022. “It’s Like We Are Not Human”: Discourses of humanisation and otherness in the representation of trans identity in British broadsheet newspapers. Feminist Media Studies. 23(6): 2962-78.
[6] Bailey, A. and MacKenzie, 2023. Support Group or Transgender Lobby? Representing Mermaids in the British press. Critical Discourse Studies: 1-19.
[7] Natalie Wynn, 2024. The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling. Youtube: ContraPoints; Donegan, M., and Daubm A. 2023. Gay Marriage with Moira and Adrian. Podcast: In Bed with the Right.
[8] Gill-Peterson, J. 2018. Histories of the Transgender Child. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press; Shuller, K. 2018. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Durham: Duke University Press; Snorton, C. 2017. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
[9] Ahmed, S. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
[10] Office for National Statistics, 2024. The Nature of Violent Crime in England and Wales: year ending March 2024; Women and Girls Network, 2024. Get Informed: Myth Busting. wgn.org.uk

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Ron @ronkilljoy.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

11/12

Andrea Gibson

I know most people try hard
to do good and find out too late
they should have tried softer.

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Ron @ronkilljoy.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

10/12

Ocean Vuong

Being queer saved my life. Often, we see queerness as deprivation. But when I look at my life, I saw that queerness demanded an alternative innovation for me. I had to make alternative routes; it made me ask, ‘is this enough for me?”

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Ron @ronkilljoy.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

9/12

Alok V. Menon

What if trans visibility wasn’t to educate cis people about how their hating themselves and taking it out on us? What if trans visibility was about keeping one another alive?

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Ron @ronkilljoy.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

8/12 I am trans, and I am tired, and I am scared. But I am committed to joy, and I am committed to hope. Art by @pinebones.bsky.social

I am trans, and I am tired, and I am scared. But I am committed to joy, and I am committed to hope.
Art by Pine Bones with the text, "this body is mine and you will not take it from me!"

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Ron @ronkilljoy.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

7/12

I cannot debunk the arguments and fact check the information in a way that will convince people who don’t want to be convinced that their transphobia/homophobia/xenophobia is an act of self-harm.
I have put references in, not because I think that anyone who disagrees with me will read things that might change their minds, but because in doing so I am reminded that I am part of a chorus. We are not alone.

The fight for liberation will be a long one: it is a marathon, not a sprint. But, while I think that there are many more painful things on our horizons, I ultimately have hope. I have hope in the kinship, academic, parasocial, and local communities I am part of. I have hope in the radical acceptance, the commitment to joy, the acts of love and kindness that I see in the people around me.

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Ron @ronkilljoy.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

6/12

Acknowledging the brutality of colonial patriarchal capitalism while being forced to live within that very same system is painful. Even if you don’t articulate it as such, you are not immune to the wounds it inflicts. It is scary. It hurts. As Sarah Ahmed writes, you are given a stranger as a body into which you can deposit your anxiety. You imagine that the immigrant, the person of colour, or the transgender person is the cause of all of the threat and danger that you might experience in your daily life. This offers you a straightforward solution: eliminate these people from your daily life. But hypothetical, imagined fears are not consistent with the data. Women and children are more likely to undergo violence by the hands of their loved ones, by people they know, than they are to receive it from the hands of a hypothetical stranger .

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Ron @ronkilljoy.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

5/12

Cisheteronormativity is profitable for the capitalist patriarchal state, from the invisible labour that women do so the state doesn’t have to, to the reproduction of a happy little workforce. Nontraditional, non-hierarchical, and elective forms of family are a threat to the body politic. It disrupts the natural order. Of course, the “natural order” is an act of white supremacist colonisation. That is to say, the argument that there are only two sexes is not only scientifically falsifiable, but it also stems from a history of colonisation and racism .

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Ron @ronkilljoy.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

4/12

Rising transphobia is not a natural phenomenon. It has been curated. Professor Paul Baker from Lancaster University found that the British press has been rapidly increasing its coverage of stories about trans people, writing roughly three and a half times as many articles in 2018-19 compared to 2012 , with a large majority of the coverage positioning trans rights as a threat to the rights of cisgender women and the public as a whole. The ”transgender issue” is a scapegoat which implies that an ideology is being imposed from nefarious forces with great power. The increase in gender variance may actually be a consequence of increasingly visible trans representation, with charities such as Mermaids’ responding to an increased need for support as opposed to enforcing a trans agenda. Today’s transphobia relies upon the same emotionally charged save-the-children rhetoric utilised in 1970s homophobia.

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Ron @ronkilljoy.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

3/12

When you act as though opinions such as, “with considered safeguards, trans children should be able to access gender affirming care” and “trans people should not be allowed to exist” are two perfectly valid sides of a reasoned debate, you act as if a centrist position would be a sensible midway point between these stances. But one of these stances wants to eliminate a minority group entirely, landing a centrist (and therefore, with the unjustified implication that it is a neutral position) opinion with a firm right leaning. Trans children are now unable to access gender affirming healthcare here in the UK (the same healthcare that cis children are still able to partake in), trans children are being threatened with forcible outing to their parents in schools, are having their participation in sports jeopardised, and trans hate crimes are accelerating at an alarming rate.

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Ron @ronkilljoy.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

2/12

Existing within the current ghost ship carousel of our present anglophone news cycle feels a little bit like deliberately putting my hand on a hot stove – painful and debilitating. So I did what any self-respecting millennial would do: I had a cry to my therapist and listened to John Darnielle’s mournful teenage idealism on repeat . I usually have to write things out to make sense of them, so what follows is a scattered rambling as I try and work my way through our next dystopian moment.

As everyone throughout history has probably felt, we are living through some scary shit. The answer, I fear, is not in demonising minority groups. Accelerating bigotry under the banner of “concern” (I’m looking at you, Britain’s bargain-bin Anita Bryant ) legitimates what we once considered to be hate-crimes. It frames microaggressions as perfectly reasonable differences of opinion. It fuels reactionary politics, the horrifying results of which we are watching in the US, and which we are already feeling in the UK.

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Ron @ronkilljoy.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

I am trans, and I am tired, and I am scared. So I wrote about it ✨ If you expected this to be proofread and better argued, allow me to refer you to the above! Art by @pinebones.bsky.social 1/12

I am trans, and I am tired, and I am scared. Art by Holls Walck (Pine Bones) with the text, "I want to be me, is that not allowed".

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Ron @ronkilljoy.bsky.social · 16/12/2024

Had a grand time @tag45.bsky.social, and especially enjoyed collaborating with @bromolloy.bsky.social for @owenexiehurcum.bsky.social and Niamh’s session! See y’all next year!

Two folks (Brodhie and Ron) happily presenting with a PowerPoint that reads, “MATES (make space for yourself, and others, try redefining resilience, embrace authenticity, shout about it)”.

A visual illustrated interpretation of a conference session, Ancestor? We hardly know her.

Drawing from a conference session exploring archaeologies of vegetal becoming.

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