a-lion-in-summer

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Worst part of transitioning is now all the stuff that made me a cool chick makes me a lame guy. Oh you skateboard? Get a fuckin job

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hi jumblr! i made these little jewish lgbt pride frames to put around images and videos for funsies

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Reddit wins this one

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Why do you care so much?

I've been asked this question a few times in the past year - why I spend so much time thinking, reading, and reflecting on antisemitism, especially because I am not Jewish myself. There are a few reasons, really. One of them is that I think antisemitism is a hatred that spawns other hatreds, but even if it did not, it would still be worth studying, because the fact that it is a hatred at all is enough. The fact that antisemitism impacts Jewish people is enough of a reason to oppose it.

It's also because it's important to oppose because of the way it damages the thinking habits of people who believe it. I saw somebody say, "Jew-Hate makes you dumb," once. And though I think it was probably an off the cuff statement for them, it stuck with me, and I think they're right. In my religion, we say hatred is one of the three poisons - it can seriously harm your mental well-being in a way that deepens your suffering in all aspects of life. Often, hatred can also be spread like a contagion. It's something that destroys social harmony and causes severe social dysfunction. And right now, I think antisemitism is the most contagious of hatreds - I've seen people in my life fall off the cliff, I've been able to talk some back from it, and I've seen how so many people wander towards it without any idea that that's what they're doing.

Part of the problem is that antisemites consider themselves righteous in a way I think most racists don't. Often, you'll see "I'm not racist but" I almost never see that with antisemitism. They don't add that qualifier. They just say it. Most racists I know will make a tacit acknowledgment of the racist implications of what they're about to say - antisemitic people don't. They often even engage in anti-Jewish racism while invoking anti-racism.

I don't really know any Jewish people in real life, perhaps only two. But I don't need to know them to know that hating them is wrong. I think I also have a debt of gratitude to many people in the Jewish community because of the advances in Buddhist Studies made by Jewish people, which sounds strange - but it's true that many leading voices and researchers, both in academia and within Buddhism itself happen to be Jewish. I'm not sure why this is, but it's absolutely true. The most prolific translator of Pali into English that I can think of is Jewish. The most impactful Vipassana instructor in America I can think of is Jewish. The most impactful voice in Deity Yoga, for Tibetan Buddhism, is Jewish. People who are Jewish, for some reason, contributed probably more than ex-Christian Americans or atheists combined to the proliferation of Buddhism in the United States.

Buddhists and Jewish people are known to have a close relationship. There are a lot of different reasons for this that I would suggest, but none that add up to explain the amazing contributions to Buddhism made by American Jews.

I think another reason I have for being so interested in antisemitism as a non-Jew is the kind of... political disillusionment I've been experiencing? It's been a disturbing few years, and I haven't seen many people elaborate very well on this feeling of abandonment and horror, witnessing people who you thought shared your values become hateful and deeply violent in their beliefs. The only people I've seen consistently speak about it happen to be Jewish.

I think all of this has helped contribute to a feeling of closeness to Jewish people as a group, despite that I don't really know Jewish people in my real life, and only have one or two Jewish friends online. This year has been a horror show of watching people's minds become twisted - it's so scary in a way I can't quite capture with words right now.

I also sometimes have a back and forth with myself about when and if to mention I'm not Jewish when I talk about antisemitism, because I do think it's totally necessary to explain the perspective from which I speak, but to be honest it feels kind of icky to be like "I'm not Jewish, but antisemitism is bad", because antisemitism is bad whether or not the person saying so isn't Jewish, and I think it might be a negative for people to think "not being Jewish" is something which makes it any less valuable to be against antisemitism, and talk about how against it you are. It's very real that people who talk about antisemitism are perceived to be Jewish, and obviously, it's important not to lead people into thinking you're Jewish when you're not, but adding an "I'm not Jewish" qualifier to statements about antisemitism I worry might contribute to the perception that those against antisemitism are Jewish.

Antisemitism is such an insidious ideology. And it's everywhere. I see it daily in so many different spaces. It has the largest impact on Jewish people, but it also impacts non-Jewish people at times. I distinctly remember being mocked throughout school for "looking Jewish." I think about that Greek restaurant which was attacked because they were thought to be Jewish. Or that man in the Amsterdam violence who tried to help and was then accused of being Jewish himself. It's so deluded, violent, and manages to consume people's thoughts like a parasitic worm in their brain.

Anyways, I planned for this post to be more organized. Oops.

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i think the anon got deleted (?) but y'all should check out Jude Doyle's new essay

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Misogyny.

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If you say the Shema you get resistance to poison damage and you get to roll twice on an INT or WIS check

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transandrophobia isnt real the way transmisogyny is real because thats not how intersectionality works. transmisogyny is specifically the intersection of oppression transfemmes face of transphobia and misogyny. for transandrophobia to be real, androphobia itself would have to be real. men are not an oppressed class. there is no systemic disenfranchisement men face for being men when living in a patriarchal society. transmascs absolutely face transphobia, and there are certain aspects of transphobia that may be different between transmascs and transfemmes, but that is not transandrophobia.

This is a fantastic explanation for why the term faces skepticism and I appreciate it because it's finally made the argument against it click for me

The remaining issue is, I don't have a different word to use when I specifically reference "transphobia that is distinctly directed towards trans men in ways that combine transphobia bioessentialism and mysoginy, that is similar to but also slightly different from that which is directed towards trans women" that still acknowleges that trans men are not women

IE, "You're not a man, you just hate facing oppression as a woman", "You're not trans, you just have internalized mysoginy", "You don't have to be a man to accomplish your goals, You're just pretending to be one so you don't have to face female gender discrimination", "Transitioning to male means you're eager to oppress women", "Now that you're a man you don't have to deal with mysoginy or gender-based violence", etc

I think the men's rights movement is bullshit, don't get me wrong, but walking around being an openly trans man, emphasis on trans man and not just man, seems to read to a lot of people as "female gender-traitor pervert", and I don't have the VOCABULARY for that experience

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Meanwhile, trans Jews: "God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason God made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine, so that humanity might share in the act of creation.""--Julian K. Jarboe

Do you think they realize how much cooler that makes it sound?

Like. I'm not even an apotheosis type of guy. But you do know that makes it sound so much cooler right?

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Credit: @pet_foolery

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Lesbian flag Seychellized.

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Tag yourself! I'm somewhere between F1 and F2!!

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you guys want more weird and complex queer people but a trans man will say he used to be a woman and everyone will explode

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This reminds me of a post I was planning to write already. Not too long ago I was people watching in a busy place with a lot of people from later middle age into elderly present. I was fascinated by the variety of facial features among these older women. Sure younger woman are distinguishable from each other, but not to nearly the extent to which these older women's faces differed in how they had responded to aging--wrinkles in different places around the mouth, nose, and eyes and of different depths; sunken or rounded cheeks, necks, and foreheads; hair graying and whitening and thinning; liver spots

In particular, I saw a lot of facial features that, had they been on the face of a woman in her 20s, would have made me think she was probably a trans woman. A lot of facial features that people draw attention to in trans discussions or try to hide in "do I pass?" photos. But as I was not at venue that was LGBT-related in any way, I knew that obviously, statistically speaking, few, if any, of these women would be trans. Their facial features were simply part of the normal range of cis women's faces as they age. It was nice to think that even trans women who have difficulty with being clocked and feeling different in their twenties or thirties are likely to feel that way less and less as they age.

we DO grow old and happy. btw.

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sometimes family is just you, your wife, your wife's surrogate daughter who is coincidentally also your mistress, your whiny teenage son, your other son whom you despise, and your other son's ex-boyfriend, better known as the king of france. And Geoffrey.

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the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?