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White tumblr racism is far more insidious than like out and proud racism cause why are you using your autism as an excuse to not view black people as equal to you

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i’m not aromantic but i believe in their beliefs

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galaxy pride flags :3

free to use w/ credit

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you've heard about how asexuals are often really good at making porn but we also need to discuss how aromantics often have discerning tastes when it comes to romance. as a mildly romance repulsed aro if i say i like a romantic story it should be taken as high praise because it generally means that the characters in the romance are fully developed people on their own, whose romantic relationship is fundamentally a very close well developed bond between equals, and the romance doesn't just exist to be the narrative equivalent of dangling keys in front of a baby

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What is the difference between romantic and platonic feelings? Well I don't really care because I've come to the conclusion that I don't experience the former whatsoever so I wouldn't understand even the most thorough and comprehensive explanation so don't try to explain it to me and do not ask me what the difference is because I literally do not know it's like asking a colorblind person what red is

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i really really hate liberals who do volunteering for orgs that help the homeless and then write thinkpieces about how a lot of homeless people are very educated and hardworking and its not at all their fault that theyre unhoused like. even if ur hypothetical homeless person is addicted to every drug abused their whoever commited many crimes and their situation is every bit their fault. no one deserves to live on the street.

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Audism exists along the lines of interpersonal ableism and institutional ableism.

Audism is when your friends cut you off for being a "gaslighter" because you couldn't hear them and asked them to repeat things. (Expressing your communication needs is abusive.) This is interpersonal ableism.

Audism is when your partner promises to take a sign language class for you for the 5th Christmas in a row and yet again does not follow through. (Your communication needs are just not that important) This is interpersonal ableism.

Audism is when your friends take advantage of your deafness to talk shit about you right around the corner. (Your trust in your friends is just not that important) This is interpersonal ableism.

Audism is when your friends take a sign language class but refuse to practice with you. (Your communication is just not that important) This is interpersonal ableism.

Audism is when a stranger makes a comment that they would have aborted you if you were their child. (Your life is just not that important) This is interpersonal ableism.

Audism is when your professor decides that he will only caption the videos you watch at home for homework, not the ones shown in class. (Your understanding of the material is just not that important) This is institutional ableism.

Audism is when the interpreter is "charging too much" to be hired for the event you were supposed to be attending. (Your access to the event is just not that important) This is institutional ableism.

Audism is when interpreters aren't required for traffic stops or any other police interactions before arrest. (Your safety around the police is just not that important) This is institutional ableism.

Audism is when your job won't let you use your FM system around customers because "they might not feel comfortable with it." (Your ability to keep your job is just not that important) This is institutional ableism.

Audism is when your professor tells you that wearing your FM system is "annoying" so he won't be doing it anymore. (Your ability to understand the lecture is just not that important) This is interpersonal AND institutional ableism.

Audism is when the police officer mocks your deaf accent while you try to speak after being denied an interpreter. (Your communication is just not that important) This is interpersonal AND institutional ableism.

Audism is when over and over again you are rejected by the people around you and the institutions you live within. Audism is when you are treated as worthless day in and day out. Audism is when you can't keep friendships, jobs, good grades, etc. because everyone gives up on you- you are not worth it. That is what the world tells us every day.

When you wake up deaf* you wake up to a world that does not want you. Your waking up in and of itself is an act of resistance in a world that would have rather you died than have to accommodate you.

*I am including all levels of hearing loss under the definition of "deaf"

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Sorry we really went from free the nipple, take back the night, slut walks, and ending gender/sex segregation in sports being fucking milquetoast feminism 101 concepts to fucking girl dinner and "I just worry about fairness if we let trans girls play against cis ones" and "it was right of that woman to call the cops on a black man for existing near here in public during the day time because men are all violent monsters" and "radical feminism isn't transphobic we just need to kill all men including trans ones those oppressive traitors" and I will legit never be able to be normal about it. What the FUCK happened. I'd say I wonder what the feminists of my youth would say about this but I'm one and lemme tell ya I want to throw up. Go fucking read bell hooks or do something else useful please because all of this learned helplessness, gender essentialism, and transphobia dressed up as feminism is actively holding us back.

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“Thought that was a beautiful butch lesbian but it’s just a man” did you know these things aren’t mutually exclusive

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Oh and I want to fight all the Gen Z kids who are like ‘teehee, we’ll just do lavender marriages instead!’ Some of us are adults who want equal rights and protections under the law of our land.

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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.

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hello all, i noticed a lack of resource online for people who are curious about intersex genital mutilation scarring later in life without having to dig through surgery gore photos. i threw together some diagrams here (content warning for discussion of IGM and drawn genitalia diagrams) of the major surgeries that are completed on intersex children. worth noting this is based purely on my own research, and i am not a doctor, and i of course am not running around doing these surgeries myself. im absolutely free to corrections or adding more diagrams if other surgeries are brought up.

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So I've got this friend whose nervous because she's trans and dating this guy who she hasn't told yet because they've only been on a two dates. For this story let's call the friend Jane and the guy she was dating Jason. Happy ending don't worry. So I tell Jane to bring her boy over to a bbq I'm having and she can tell him she's trans at my place surrounded by queer and trans people who love her and will support her if he ends up being awful. She waits till the end of the bbq to tell him the news, by which point the rest of us have learned that Jason is a kind, friendly, empathetic, hard working, dummy. So we sit down, all of us a little worried about this gym bro's reaction when she tells him she's trans, and that she understands if he doesn't want to keep dating her it's no big deal. He's baffled, so we explain what trans is, and after the disclosure that she hasn't had bottom surgery yet... "Oh you have a dick?" "... yeah." He look's around at the room full of people with baited breath, his clearly a little afraid girl friend says "Oooohhhh! I get it! You think- don't worry Babe! Watch this!"

And ya'll this man jumps up, runs into the kitchen and returns with one of the bratwurst we had for grilling and proceeds to tilt his head back, put it down his throat, hold it in his mouth for a moment, and spit it up without even a whisper of a gag and then looks around at the group absolutely beaming with pride. My mans saw his worried girlfriend and her support network and thought to him self "Oh they don't think I can please my girl but I'll show them!"

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I bring a “there’s no meaningful difference between men and women that doesn’t exclude someone” to the function that gender essentialists hate

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It’s more comforting to convince yourself that all men are assholes then it is to face reality which is that your ex boyfriend wasn’t destined to become an asshole but for a variety of complicated societal and personal reasons he ended up that way anyways even though he could’ve chosen to not be an asshole