ladygoshawk

[ladygoshawk]

One of the most annoying things about having a chronic illness is knowing that most people are able to call out for work or change their plans when they have your symptoms- but if you do it, you’re penalized, because you are sick so often.

So you go to work anyway.

Or you change your plans and people get upset with you.

There’s no patience or understanding- you’re expected to get better, and when you aren’t, people don’t want to deal with it.

I often wish they could experience my symptoms for like a month, just to get a taste of what it’s like.

[ladygoshawk]

you know that expression, "dance like no one is watching you?"

try writing like no one is going to read it

it's easier to let yourself go and just enjoy the process of creation when you aren't also playing 6 dimensional chess with your insecurities and anxieties

write because you have fun writing and if you never post it anywhere that's totally fine because you enjoyed your time with the process

[ladygoshawk]

This is not news, but it is an important read, especially for people who were previously unaware of the trend of neo-Nazis stealing pagan symbols for their own.

If you are an anti-racist, anti-fascist pagan, keep doing what you are doing, you are keeping the fight alive

If you are an anti-racist, anti-fascist person who is not a pagan, help us spread the word of this, stand in solidarity with us as we kick the fascists out of our communities

If you are a fascist pagan, fuck off, this faith is a peaceful one

No platforms for fascists.

~ Max

[ladygoshawk]

There’s a post going around about how colour has gradually drained from our daily lives. Many have pointed out that this is a symptom of capitalism, and the need for products to be saleable to the broadest spectrum (pardon the pun) of consumers, thereby removing any aesthetic idiosyncrasies like ‘not being grey or beige’. I wanted to point out something further though.

Greyness has always been used as a threat by anti-communist propaganda. A report from the BBC recalls that the Eastern Bloc was ‘grey, regimented and plagued by shortages’; Polish defector to *checks notes* California, Czesław Miłosz, wrote in his 1953 anti-communist study that ‘The chronic lack of consumer goods renders the crowds uniformly gray and uniformly indigent.’ And yes, this is all very connected to consumer goods. Imagine, if indeed you can, the same shitty, overpriced cafe on every street corner, no matter the city, always the same, always bland, always brutally exploitative to workers. The nightmare of collectivisation! But those were different times. Thankfully we in the noble West can today enjoy ice cream from Walls, Miko, Ola, Algida, Streets, and even Good Humor!

But back then, bootlickers advocates of capitalism cried out, if we sacrifice our right to brutally exploit disenfranchised classes rugged individualism for the sake of collective prosperity, then we’ll lose our very individuality, and become mere drones serving the totalitarian state! Red scare iconography used to feature lots of grey Nehru jackets and imposing brutalist architecture (both of which are fucking rad honestly so I don’t know how that was meant to scare us anyway) to represent mindless conformity and submission to absolute communist power. Yet now we somehow see graphs like this:

So what gives? I’m reminded of a tweet from a short, half-Irish and half Jewish (but secular), dark-haired light-eyed former child star…

Meanwhile in real, existing socialist countries we see vistas like these:

And let’s not forget the hayday of signature artistic styles of the Eastern Bloc, socialist realism and socialist modernism:

Imagine living in a world so drained of colour and culture! Who could survive such a cold, monotone existence but the, err, Reds. Think of these dystopian images next time you enjoy your Starbucks™ coffee on one of your plentiful breaks from work at the luxurious capitalism retailer, and rejoice at the freedom of choice our glorious leaders have handed down to us in their world-beating beneficence.

[ladygoshawk]

cutting child porn from ao3 is not going to be a ‘slippery slope’ to full blown ‘censorship’, you guys are just pedophiles

[ladygoshawk]

Pete Buttigieg is just a faggot.

It's very important to me that younger queers understand this: to the people who you're trying to be more respectable for when you say things like neopronouns set the trans movement back or you're why the cishets don't accept us or including [aces/bi people with the 'wrong kind' of partners/non-binary people/kinksters/non-passing trans ppl/furries/polyam people] just hurts us, can't you wait until we get all our rights before we talk about some of yours? -- to those people? Pete Buttigieg is just a fag.

On Sunday at Pride Northwest, some kids -- late teens, early 20s -- asked what our button I survived Reagan for this? meant. All of the queer adults at the tables making up our ad hoc counter looked at each other and sighed a little. Emet and another adult started to explain the way that the Reagan Administration handled -- or didn't handle -- the beginning of the AIDS crisis. How many people died. How much we were ignored. The Ashes Action. The Time Magazine article which explicitly blamed bisexual men for passing the pandemic to the cishet community, playing on all the worst stereotypical bullshit. The way that even when the CDC started paying attention, they were so focused on gay men that they ignored AIDS in the lesbian community, leading to the "women don't get AIDS, they just die from it" poster. And so on.

I finished counting out change and passed the last Bear Pride raised fist pin over to a bear a little older than me, then turned my head and interjected, "they didn't care until it started infecting more than just the fags." I turned my head back and handed him his change. He laughed bitterly and said, "remember when they called it 'gay cancer?'"

That what I need you to understand. The people for whom you are folding yourself into smaller and smaller boxes will never see you as anything but a freak. A queer. A dyke. A tranny. A fag.

Never.

These are people who will stand by and let you wither away and die alone, gasping for breath in a cinderblock room, and not even claim your ashes, and they will say you deserve it, because of your lifestyle. If they speak of you at all it will be by the wrong name, with the pictures you hate the most. They will curse at your lover, throw him out of the home you shared, and steal the gift you gave last Christmas to throw it in the trash just so he can't have it and they'll say Jesus loves you! while they do it. They'll feel good and righteous and blessed and holy and pure for doing it.

And for them, you spit in the eye of your sister. For them, you disavow your sibling. For their sake, you trim away bits of your heart and lace yourself up tight. Never too loud. Never too queer. Never inconvenient or embarrassing, never asking for too much.

Pete Buttigieg is what happens when your Boomer dad turns out gay. Middle America. Parents still married. Suburban-sprouted. Valedictorian. Harvard-educated. Rhodes Scholarship. Military service. More power to him: I hope he and Chasten are very happy together. Genuinely, I do.

You couldn't create a more respectable gay if you grew one in a lab run by concerned voter focus groups.

But Pete Buttigieg? Is just a fag.

That's the part you don't seem to get: when they abandoned us, they abandoned all of us. Rock Hudson was a beloved movie star and even personally friendly with that horrid pair of ambitious jackals. Nancy Reagan refused to help him get into the only place in the world that could treat him at the time, and he died.

It was 1985, 4 years after the CDC first released papers on what would eventually become known as HIV/AIDS and 7 years after the first known death from an infection from HIV-2. Reagan hadn't even said the word AIDS by the time Hudson died.

Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, and so am I. Unless I'm a dyke, which seems to depend on who's yelling what from which window and what day it is.

Yes, there will be people who genuinely love and accept you. Those people are worth all the frustration of the rest, thankfully, and they're the ones who love you in a pup mask or a leather harness and a neon jock like the ones sold by the men up the row from us last weekend. They're the ones who laugh out loud when you tell them you hid the word "dyke" in your company name, the ones who love you in all your messiness and uncertainty and the way you don't fit into neat boxes all scrubbed up and clean.

Most cishets, though... well, they don't actively mean you specifically any harm, at least not when they have to look at you. Not when you're right there in front of them. Maybe they'll be okay with you, personally, especially if you're the kind of gay who makes a good rhetorical device, and as long as you remain a good rhetorical device.

They need people to know that they don't have a problem with the gays, after all, and there you are, being all convenient. You make a nice token, and as long as you do, well. You're useful.

But they call you by your deadname when you're not around, and they put the wrong pronouns in your medical record even though they met you years after you came out, and they won't put themselves out to save you. Not one little bit.

I didn't want to be here again. The year I graduated from high school was the worst year of the AIDS crisis. The world into which I became an adult was a world in which an advisor and friend to Reagan, William F. Buckley, openly advocated for forcibly tattooing the HIV status of HIV+ gay men on their buttocks (and IV drug users on their forearms), and in which my father not only told me that when I was 14 or so, but when was told me that he'd advocated for that tattoo being "over their assholes."

(Buckley wrote that in '86, but he doubled down on it in 2005.

Fucker.)

But yeah. I didn't want to be here again. I wanted my daughter to inherit a better world. I wanted Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas and Hope & Change to really mean something. I work for it, today and all days. I haven't given up.

I need you to know that, too. This isn't a white flag. I'm not surrendering. This isn't over. To misquote Henry Rollins, this is what Marsha and Sylvia and Stormé and Leslie and Brenda and Auntie Sugar trained us for. This is punk rock time.

But I need you to understand that if Pete Buttigieg is just a fag, if that human embodiment of a Wonder Bread, mayo and Oscar Meyer bologna sandwich is not respectable enough for them -- and he's not -- then the rest of us have absolutely no hope of measuring up. Not even if we trim away every colorful, beautiful piece of our community, not even if the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence vanish into the ether, not even if we sacrifice the five elements of vogue on the altar of white supremacist cishet middle-class conformity: we can't trim ourselves down to something they'll accept.

The only other option is radical acceptance of our queer selves. The only other option is solidarity. The only other option is for fats and femme queens and drags and kinksters and queers and zine writers and sex workers and furries and addicts and kids and the ones who can look us in the eye and see all of us to say we're here, we're queer, get used to it just the way we did 30 years ago. It's revolutionary, complete and total acceptance of our entire community, not just the ones the cishets can pretend to be comfortable with as long as we don't challenge them too much, or it's conceding the shoreline inch by inch to the rising waters of fascism until we've got nowhere left to stand and some of us start drowning.

That's it. Either it's all of us or it's none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don't agree with it but we'll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.

The brunch gays can come, too, I guess.

[ladygoshawk]

One of the most common reasons I hear for people being against abortion is because “life is sacred.”

Really? Since when? When has life ever been sacred in this country?

If life is sacred, how come we don’t have universal healthcare?

If life is sacred, how come we don’t pass comprehensive gun laws so first graders don’t get gunned down in their classrooms?

If life is sacred, why don’t we offer paid maternal leave so mothers can actually take care of the babies that you are now forcing them to have?

If life is sacred, how come we don’t bat an eye when the police murder black kids?

If life is sacred, why do we have the highest maternal death rate in the developed world, which is only going to increase now that women are being forced to give birth?

If life is sacred, why is the death penalty even still a thing?

If life is sacred, why are we still encouraging violence against the LGBTQ+ community?

Life has literally never been sacred in this country. Maybe anti-choicers like to pretend that it is because it makes them feel righteous when in reality, they’re just misogynistic pieces of shit, but it’s not. And as long as psychotic, reactionary morons continue to steal power undemocratically and make decisions that the majority of us do not want, it never will be.

[ladygoshawk]

source

Caption:

[[@else: I suppose it's time to tell my abortion story. Of the abortion that didn't happen, that led to me.

A lot of anti-abortion people put words & thoughts into the mouths of the unborn.

Well, I'm one that was recommended to stay unborn, who got born, and here's what I say.

My mother found our very early in her pregnancy that there was an extremely high risk to her if she continued.

Terminating the pregnancy was floated by one of the doctors. It would have been legal due to the risk to her, but heavily stigmatized.

Her family was deeply Catholic. She was deeply Catholic.

She did not terminate. The risk became a reality.

So I'm here, and she's not.

I'm glad to be here.

It is hard to put into words the gratitude you feel to a mother who sacrificed herself entirely for you, and I'm not going to try here.

Because I'm also very angry.

Without in any way taking away from the courage and selflessness with which she bore her situation and which she showed in all aspects of her life

I don't believe she ever really felt like she had a true choice.

The stigma, the religious dogma, the judgement - everything she'd ever known - told her she could not save her own life.

Her parents would have, however sadly, believed she'd go to hell. Her family and friends and community would have judged her.

Everyone she'd ever loved believed it was wrong. And so she believed it was wrong.

Needlessly.

I don't know what choice she would have made if it had been a true choice.

Maybe she would have chosen me anyway. Maybe she would have chosen to stay for her two already-existing children and for all those who loved her so deeply.

But she should have had a real, true choice.

Would I trade being here for that?

In a heartbeat. Without hesitation.

My siblings could have grown up with their mother.

My grandparents could have seen their beloved daughter live out her beautiful life, instead of mourning her every day until their deaths.

Her brothers and sisters would not still thirty years later feel the pain of losing the sistre they loved so much.

She could have continued to bring the light to the world that she had always brought, that I have heard so much about.

My father perhaps would not have descended into the grief & guilt that destroyed him, our relationship with him, the innocence of our childhoods.

Now, I think about how my young nieces & nephews will grow up without her, without the kind of grandmother I had. That pains me too.

I grew up in the devastation of her death.

I've watched the consequences of it play out for thirty years.

I can see what might have been differently if she'd had a true choice and it snatches my breath away, to see the suffering that didn't have to be for the ones I love most.

I know that it is not my family, but it is also profoundly difficult to know that it is because of me.

Or to be more exact, because the world did not allow my mother her right to a true choice, and my being here is perhaps a result of that.

It's not a burden I'd wish on anyone

I wish that I could have told her. It's okay. Stay. Live. Be happy.

I wish I could know that she knew that that was more than ok.

Don't I want to be here? Don't I want to be alive, aren't I glad to live??

Now that I'm here, sure. But had I never been, what would I have lost? Nothing.

You can't miss what you never had. Can't lose anything when you never existed.

There's no pain or loss in not existing.

I didn't exist then, to want anything. I didn't exist to hope or wish or fear anything.

I didn't exist back then. Not me. There was a possibility. An idea, a hope maybe. Some cells, a process in her body. Not me, any more than a sperm was me or an egg was me.

*I" didn't become until much later. Til I was born.

My mother wouldn't have taken anything from me or cause me any pain by living for herself, because I didn't exist to lose anything.

There was so much pain, so much loss in losing her. Loss that will ripple down generations.

So I will say to my dying breath, as the person who only lives because she didn't abort, that whatever she thought or chose or did not chose, she should have had a real choice to abort.

That she should have felt that aborting me was valid and good a choice as not.

Everyone should feel that, and have real access to enact that choice without obstruction or shame or question.

Whether it is their actual life at risk, or not. A forced pregnancy can be the death of many things, not just the end of ther person's life.

Having me took away from the world everything that my mother could have given it.

Forcing someone to have a child against their will can take away what that person could be and bring if they had their choice, whether they live through the pregnancy or not.

Most of all it takes away their right - their inalienable right - to choose how they live their life in their own body.

A non-person, a hypothetical future event, the birth of someone who doesn't exist yet, doesn't have that right.

Other people, who claim to speak for the unborn do not have that right.

We all lose so much by it. It can cause such pain and suffering, for child-bearers, for children, for everyone.

Do not pretend to speak for the unborn.

Do not pretend to speak for the children born against their mother's will.

Do not pretend that you care for them while you hide misogyny behind dogma.

My mother deserved her right to a real choice.

Everyone does. Unconditionally.

As the child who could have been aborted, I tell you - to oppose that right, let alone work to criminalize it, is unforgivable.

I'd like to emphasize because I didn't say it loud enough in the original thread:

There doesn't need to be a tragic story or a threat to life to make abortion ok.

It can be simply because you don't want to have a child. That's all. You still have the right to a choice.

I told my sad story because:

a) it is important to me to counter the rhetoric of anti-choice folks, that claims that if the unborn could speak they would be anti-choice

b) forced pregnancies can really f*ck up lives in many ways and that needs to be recognized.

But:

There shouldn't have to be a tale of woe to justify bodily autonomy.

It's a right. An absolute right. It should be protected by law.

That's it. That's all.

Last thingL I want this point to be heard, but I don't particularly want to deal with blowing up on twitter.

I will probably lock my account down at some point, but I would like this still to be shared. Maybe use an unroll app and share from there if you would like to.]]

[ladygoshawk]

This is a pro-choice blog.

It’s an I wanted this baby but at my anatomy scan I found out my baby will die after it’s born blog.

It’s an I’m not financially, mentally or emotionally stable enough to bring a child into this world blog.

It’s an I can’t live with the result of my sexual assault blog.

It’s an I miscarried but the fetus will not evacuate on its own blog.

It’s an I will die if I carry this to term blog.

It’s an I don’t want to be fucking pregnant blog.

It’s a pro-choice blog.

If you see this decision as a win, educate yourself. People with uteruses WILL die. And if that’s okay with you, don’t claim you’re pro-life.

Oh, and a big, fat FUCK YOU.

[ladygoshawk]

Anxiety is not activism.

[ladygoshawk]

You NEED To Take A Break

Be mad and angry but then REST because behind a screen being mad and angry only hurts you. It burns you out and then you feel helpless and isolated. Helplessness and isolation kills your hope and drive and makes you complacent with the times.

Your morals are not flaky for needing to rest, to take a beat, to recover. Draw that commission, watch that show, play that game. Go for a walk, plan that vacation.

We’re not meant to go all in every second. We are persistence predators. We wear down our quarry but NOT ourselves. This digital era of instant feedback clashes with that.

We’re 2 years into a worldwide pandemic and 6 years since the 2016 election where we spent 4 years glued to our phones awaiting a new wave of fresh hot shit and horror every day from the previous president. Our ‘disaster reserves’ in our brains are drained.

Most of us in the states are so burned out were are close to hysterics or so numb that the thought of living through more of this fills us with suicidal dread.

TAKE A BREAK!

Its doubly hard when you feel like your only way to help out is to spend money (which many of us just don’t have) or continue to doomscroll and share and add to the doomscrolling.

Its good to be mad about this, we all SHOULD be mad about this. But don’t burn yourself out. A friend of mine said activism is a marathon. We gotta plan out next steps and use that anger as a fuel.

If it takes spite, rage, fire and blood we WILL find a way. There is no other option. But today is only day one, we need you around still in day 100 if it takes that long, so stay rested.

Check the resource threads made available by groups you trust, talk to your friends, and check in on one another often. It’s a marathon.

[ladygoshawk]

Absolutely amazing 🏳️‍🌈🫶🌈

[ladygoshawk]

By the way legislators aren’t making laws specifically targeting the LGBTQ community because of pansexuals or trans people without dysphoria or aces and aros. They’re doing it because they hate queer people, and want to make us existing openly illegal.

No amount of “but but but the new labels are making us look bad and people won’t take us seriously” will ever change the fact that you are putting yourself on the side of people that want us dead. So stand by your community, or put a damn sock in it.

[ladygoshawk]

[ladygoshawk]

Super fucked up that I can’t be a master-level expert in knitting AND woodworking AND silversmithing AND embroidery AND soap making AND spinning AND -

[ladygoshawk]

[ladygoshawk]

Dear Fanfiction Writers,

I've been debating writing this for a while, and for whatever reason, now is the time it's going to come out.

You don't owe anyone completed work.

People write fanfiction for different reasons. Some do it for themselves. Others do it for practice. Some do it for the community interaction. Whatever your reason, it's yours, and if what you're writing no longer serves a purpose for you, you're allowed to drop it.

You're also allowed to start new works and write what you want, even if you have a slew of incompletes behind it.

I know I struggle with this. I'll have works I feel guilty about not finishing for whatever reason, and it can be validly hard to worry about disappointing people who have been enjoying something you've worked on. But that guilt can also serve to staunch creativity and your own peace of mind. And that doesn't benefit you in the least.

Again, whatever it is, you have a particular reason why you write. And if what you're working on no longer has any benefit for you, I'm here to say it's okay to let it go and then not feel bad about pursuing what you want - or not pursuing anything at all.

And you're allowed to have peace with that decision.

<3 Dross