"The trannies should be able to piss in whatever toilet they want and change their bodies however they want. Why is it my business if some chick has a dick or a guy has a pie? I'm not a trannie or a fag so I don't care, just give 'em the medicine they need."
"This is an LGBT safe space. Of COURSE I fully support individuals who identify as transgender and their right to self-determination! I just think that transitioning is a very serious choice and should be heavily regulated. And there could be a lot of harm in exposing cis children to such topics, so we should be really careful about when it is appropriate to mention trans issues or have too much trans visibility."
One of the above statements is Problematic and the other is slightly annoying. If we disagree on which is which then working together for a better future is going to get really fucking difficult.
I think this is something young people in particular are confused about. My dad has always had a slightly off color sense of humor, he always feels the need to privately ask me “boy turned girl or girl turned boy?” if I mention a friend and stress said friend’s pronouns, and yet when we had repair work done in the house and the worker was listening to a podcast discussing the evils of transgender people and how to cleanse society, he went out of his way to contact the owner of the business to discuss his disappointment with that worker’s conduct and stress the negative effect that could have had if there had been trans kids in our home.
Our allies will never be perfect. They will never use the perfect language or have the perfect politics. But we have to appreciate those allies and meet them where they are, especially if they are willing to learn.
Hot take but I think our allies being flawed makes them even better. Sometimes the shit they say makes us think. Or reevaluate how uber-sanitized and bullshit the stuff we say is. I’ll take an ally with a little too much boldness on what they say or how over some “Audibly Walking On Eggshells Smiling Way Too Wide Looking At Me Like I Might Eat Them If They So Much As Stutter A Little person who says they’re a huge ally but it’s clear they have no fucking idea what they’re talking about and they’re just using as much “current vocabulary” as they possibly can to sound as ally as possible” any day.
My partner knew about trans issues before I came out and was always supportive, he'd sometimes ask questions and I'd explain things to him, but he was never in trans spaces/culture. He didn't know all the current vocabulary and whatnot.
Still, he reacted negatively and got very upset, but I knew it didn't come from a place of malice and I gave him some time to think and after the initial emotions had settled (he's autistic, doesn't do well with change and hadn't really put much thought into whether he could also be into men up to that point).
We talked openly and honestly and eventually, he started reflecting on how much happier I am, how I basically went from feeling completely numb, anxious, passive and miserable to a more optimistic, joyful version of myself than he'd ever seen in our 9 years together and how much of a difference just admitting to myself that I'm trans made. He could tell that I'm genuinely happier and that was really all it took.
Within a few days he was already consistently using the right pronouns (despite first stressing how difficult it'd be for him and how he'd mess up all the time), coming up with new cutesy nicknames for me and within a week of us talking about our feelings and concerns as they came up, he told me not to second-guess myself because of him, that he'll always support me no matter what, as long as I'm happy, that we'll figure things out together like we always do.
It meant so much to me that he never felt like he had to walk on eggshells around me. He got all the problematic questions out, got over it and now he's perfectly comfortable making lighthearted trans jokes that make me laugh and doing stuff like taking me on a date to the sports bar to play pool because "you're a guy now and this is what I do with my boys".
He fully sees me as a man and goes out of his way to do many little things to affirm my gender. He's my biggest ally and the convos I've had with him did more to help me figure myself out and become more secure in my transness than even ones I had with other trans people, because with him I'm never afraid that I'll say something wrong and get a negative reaction (which triggers my rejection sensitive dysphoria), and he often asks questions that others would think are inappropriate to ask (for example whether anal sex feels so good to me because it's gender affirming or if it's just for kinky reasons, I genuinely had to ruminate on that one for a bit lol).
I'm just gonna come out and say the controversial thing that's been weighing on me for months now.
I am visibly Trans and I experience transphobia on a regular basis. I have never once been misgendered or made to feel uncomfortable by a member of my Jewish community.
I am visibly Jewish and I experience anti-Judaism on a regular basis. I am consistently devalued, shunned, and othered by Queer people in Queer spaces and Queer communities because of my Jewish identity.
LGBTQIA+ people need to do better to accommodate religious minorities. Anti-Jewish sentiment due to Queer-based religious trauma isn't any better, kinder, or more moral than anti-Jewish sentiment due to white supremacy.
@unbidden-yidden There it is! Couldn’t have said it better myself
[ID: tumblr tags that read "some of y'all really need to get it through your heads that while atheism is 100% fine - antitheism is actually a hate group that helps further the goals of white supremacy and xtian colonialism - it's continued tolerance in queer spaces makes them unsafe for queer religious minorities including queer Xtians of color" /END ID]
"idc about surveillance, i've got nothing to hide." Okay well maybe you should then? Get some goddamn. flavor in your life already
I just think it's healthy and good to have some things that are private, and space to connect with your unobserved self. sorry
Is it just me or should prisoners work for free....? You're in prison because you committed crimes, some of them incredibly heinous and disturbing..... Why should we pay you for manual labor whilst in prison?

and even if you somehow forgot that part, you're overlooking the part where adding economic incentive to incarcerate more people can and does lead to false arrests. there are lots of cases where judges got exposed for taking money under the table in exchange for lengthening prison sentences and sentencing people who would otherwise be found innocent. one guy in one of the carolinas was bribed to send as many Black kids as possible to a for-profit prison. he was quite literally selling children into slavery. they were not freed when he was caught and removed from the bench
Members of the so-called “alt right” or “manosphere” actually bear very strong similarities to cult members - they become increasingly rigid in their beliefs, they have decreasing tolerance for ambiguity (everything starts to become either right or wrong, with no room for grey areas), they become increasingly preoccupied with “purity” of thought, their beliefs start to become the core of their personal identity, they accept the word of thought leaders without question or critical thinking, their relationships with family and friends deteriorate, and they often experience negative consequences at work or school as a direct result of their beliefs.
Dealing with a friend or family member who has joined the alt-right is very different from dealing with a family member who is dabbling with the idea of voting Conservative for economic reasons, or dealing with a family member who erroneously believes that Game of Thrones isn’t very good. Reasoned discussion and laying out your point of view will not work here. The tactics that you need to use with him are actually the tactics used to deprogram cult members, which includes things like:
One of the hard parts about dealing with alt-right family members is that people make the mistake of approaching them as a political movement, when it is more appropriate to address them as a cult. The way that they operate is much more similar to the dynamics of a cult than the dynamics of a mainstream political movement, and deprogramming techniques are your best bet for getting your family member back. I highly recommend that you and your family read up on cults and the tactics used to get people out of them. It is especially helpful to read testimony from people who have escaped cults or successfully been persuaded to leave them - if possible, look for materials from people who have left the alt-right, and try to present this material to your brother. This is an incredibly difficult thing for a family to go through, and I highly recommend that you seek out other families who are dealing with similar situations - you are far from alone here.
Best of luck to all of you.
"old friends" is an underrated relationship dynamic because it's such an innocent boring sounding term for what is usually some of the wildest shit imaginable. it's always like 'oh yeah we go way back, we have history' and then you find out that history includes sex, drugs, murder, divorce, war crimes and The Incident
I think people need to tell more kids that they're proud of them for graduating high school. I'm absolutely dead serious, especially now. I can see the graduating high schoolers surrounding me right now are burned out and traumatized and depressed, and they've undoubtedly had a much, much harder time in high school than I ever had, and I had some pretty shitty high school experiences.
I graduated high school with no more acknowledgement than the standard "congrats on surviving another year of school!" And immediately followed by "have you finished all your scholarship applications?" That was fine for me. I knew i wanted to go to college, I was set and ready for it, eager to get out of high school into more challenging courses.
But if I just finished high school after two years of fighting through online courses and no one acknowledged the battles I went through? If I was as burnt out and traumatized as these kids are right now? I'd have never have gone to college.
Anyways. I wish a very good night to medium and high support needs autistics. You deserve the world.
one of the cooler parts of growing up is realizing that you were being incessantly lied to throughout highschool and that fat gay people are not only capable of being desired, but are actively and often voraciously lusted after
let’s talk about the early stages of hyperfixation where you can literally feel your brain getting doses of serotonin because of a show or a movie or a person or a character and mentally you’re like ‘ooooh no’ but it’s like a blackhole you can’t run or escape from so you just gotta ride it out knowing full well the next few months are going to be spent mindlessly obsessing over this thing