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maybe this is bc i’m from the south and not fuckin uhhhh new york or wherever the hell but like. it is still not really normalized for a man to wear makeup or nail polish. women with short hair still get offensive comments about their appearances. like even small acts of gender nonconformity can still be scary and dangerous in 2021 and i feel like so many people just live in this progressive bubble where they think that all dudes being Remotely “feminine” in some way are like homophobic tiktok e-boys doing it for clout or whatever and that’s uh. fucking stupid. like i can PROMISE you that the vast majority of gender nonconforming people are not trying to do something that’s never been done before, nor are they claiming to do so, they’re just trying to live their lives and look the way they want to look. you aren’t helping anybody by trying to police who has the right to be wearing skirts or painting their nails or doing their hair a certain way.

anyway this is ur daily reminder that gender nonconformity is not a trend and it’s gross to attack people for being gender nonconforming in a way that you think “has been done before” or “isn’t that special” or whatever the fuck. like i’m sorry but it’s just cruel and hateful! being gender nonconforming still takes bravery and courage. people still face discrimination and harassment. whose cause do you think you’re helping by attempting to be the gatekeeper of nontraditional gender expression? genuinely, who do you think benefits when you attack people for stepping outside of the bounds of traditional gender expression? who? because it certainly fucking isn’t gnc people.

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why “spanking is harmful” studies will, ultimately, never matter to parents who want to hit their kids:

@fandomsandfeminism wrote a great post recently about the fact that we have, essentially, a scientific consensus on the fact that all forms of hitting children, including those euphemistically referred to as “spanking”, are psychologically harmful. they’ve also done an amazing job responding to a lot of parents self-admitted abusers who think “I hit my child and I’m okay with that” and/or “I was hit as a child and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me” are more meaningful than 60 years of peer-reviewed research.

unfortunately, I’m here to tell you why all of that makes very little difference.

in 2014, a couple of researchers from UCLA and MIT named Alan Fiske and Tage Rai published a book called Virtuous Violence, the result of a major study of the motivations for interpersonal violence. Rai wrote a shorter piece about it in Quartz, which is a pretty light but still illuminating (hah, I did not see that pun coming but I’m gonna leave it) read.

the upshot of Fiske and Rai’s work is that most violence is fundamentally misunderstood because we think it is inherently outside the norms of a supposedly moral society. we presume that when someone commits a mass shooting or beats their spouse they are somehow intrinsically broken, either incapable of telling right from wrong or too lacking in self-control to prevent themselves from doing the wrong thing.

but what Fiske and Rai found was that, in fact, the opposite is true: most violence is morally motivated. people who commit violent acts aren’t lacking moral compasses - they believe those violent acts are not only morally acceptable, but morally obligatory. usually, these feelings emerge in the context of a relationship which is culturally defined as hierarchical. in other words, parents who commit violence against their children do so because they believe it is necessary that they do so in order to establish or affirm the dominance which they feel they are owed by both tradition and moral right.

when abusive parents say that they are “hitting children for their own good”, they are not speaking in terms of any rational predictions for the child’s future, but rather from a place of believing that the child must learn to be submissive in order to be a “good” child, to fulfill their place in the relationship.

this kind of violence is not the result of calm, intellectually reasoned deliberation about the child’s well-being. for that reason and that reason alone it will never be ended by scientific evidence.

history tells us more than we need to verify this. the slave trade and the institution of racial slavery, and their attendant forms of “corrective” physical violence, for instance, did not end because someone demonstrated they were physically or psychologically harmful to slaves - that was never a question in people’s minds to begin with. for generations, slavery was upheld as right and good not because it was viewed as harmless, but because it was viewed as morally necessary that one category of people should be “kept in their place” below another by any means necessary, because they were lower beings by natural order and god’s law. this violence ended because western society became gradually less convinced of the whole moral framework at play, not because we needed scientists to come along and demonstrate that chain gangs and whippings were psychologically detrimental. this is only one example from a world history filled with many, many forms of violence, both interpersonal and structural, which ultimately were founded on the idea that moral hierarchies must be maintained through someone’s idea of judiciously meted-out suffering.

and this, ultimately, is why we cannot end violence against children by pointing out that it is harmful - because the question of whether or not it is harmful does not enter into parents’ decisions about whether or not to commit violence in the first place. what they care about is not the hypothetical harm done to the child, but the reinforcement of the authority-ranked nature of the relationship itself. the reason these people so often sound like their primary concern is maintaining their “right” to hit their children is because it is. they believe that anyone telling them they can’t hit their children is attempting to undermine the moral structure of that individual relationship and, in a broader sense, the natural order of adult-child relations in society.

and that’s why the movement has to be greater than one against hitting kids. it has to be a movement against treating them as inferior, in general. it has to be a movement that says, children are people, that says children’s rights are human rights, that says the near-absolute authority of parents, coupled with the general social supremacy of adults and the marginalization of youth, have to all be torn down at once as an ideology of injustice and violence. anything less is ultimately pointless.

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Some rando: You should think about stopping your prescription

Me: My pills make me not want to die tho

They: You shouldn’t want to die, that’s not normal

Me: Yeah that’s why I’m taking my pills

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Ron Cobb, 1970

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stop making fun of bad people for being fat or having small dicks or being socially awkward or whatever else you seem to think is a fair target. none of that shit has anything to do with why theyre bad. i don’t care if a nazi has a stutter or a terf has thinning hair or whatever. at best youre missing the point, at worst your comments are gonna hurt vulnerable people more than they will ever affect the shitty person you’re mocking. why are you so attached to these bullshit standards anyway?

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“this information perpetuates a harmful narrative that–”

okay but is it fucking true?

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Ben, 64, Northampton, MA, 2014

I identify as an FTM, non-hormone, non-op, transsexual heterosexual man. That’s the whole string of it. I was in the lesbian community when I was younger, but I never really fit. That was the 1970s and there really wasn’t the language then about transmen or FTMs or any of that. I didn’t have that accessible to me as an identity. I thought, “I’m the only one on the planet like me,” but then in 1985, Lou Sullivan sent his little booklet through the mail to the archives I was working on. It was “Information for the Female-to-male Crossdresser and Transsexual,” a little booklet that he self-published with a little handwritten note that said, “Maybe some people in your archive would want to read this.” Even though he didn’t know me, he didn’t know who he was sending this to, I read it. I read it and within two hours I called him and I said, “I gotta meet you, because now there’s two of us, you know, on the planet.” And I flew to San Francisco to meet him.

When I got there, I dressed up super masculine. I even wore temporary facial hair, because I wanted to demonstrate to him that I was a man. So, he opens the door and he is this little frail ninety-eight pound gay guy with a t-shirt on and I thought, “Well, he’s a man and he’s kinda like me, but he’s kinda not like me.” We ended up talking for five hours straight in his kitchen. In the middle of it, he told me he had to get up and take his AZT. I hadn’t known that he had HIV/AIDS, but I realized then that I was making the closest friend of my entire life, the most pivotal individual for me, and that I was losing him at the same time. We corresponded until he died and when he died, I started the East Coast FTM Group because I had nobody and he had asked me to head up his group in San Francisco, which I couldn’t do.

I always felt some resistance to the fact that I didn’t transition medically, but over time I started to find transsexuals who had not transitioned medically, or who had transitioned partially and then stopped, like my friend Leslie Feinberg. Eventually I found more people with the idea that, “I’m already me, I don’t need any medical intervention to become me.” It took a ten-year journey with a gender counselor to give myself permission around this, because it is not popular, even in our community.

I’ve done a lot of organizing, much of it pre-internet. I did it the way Lou did it at first, all by mail. I remember the first big conference I went to, a True Spirit Conference, and I think there were 300 guys, FTMs, from all over the country and Canada, and I remember thinking, “It’s starting. The movement for FTMs is really starting, big time.” Now I have a vision for making the Sexual Minorities Archives a national comprehensive LGBTQ educational resource center with a museum and an art gallery with many rooms to show the collections, to have a youth room, to have a meeting room, to have a community room, and to be the preeminent LGBTQ archive on the East Coast. That’s what I’m most looking forward to as I age and that’s what I want to accomplish before I die.

From: To Survive on This Shore

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Fuck CGL. All Out For Wedzin Kwa!!!

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Jonice Webb, Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect

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This story is absolutely wild; a small town of less than 1,500 people (that reported not one serious crime over the last decade) with a massively oversized police force driving unmarked cars and wearing uniforms with no insignia is operating what is essentially an extortion racket by ticketing anyone passing through for reasons that are spurious at best. The scope of the thing is just insane, the town revenue doubled through a 640% increase in ticketing and seizures in just two years (while simultaneously massively ballooning the police budget) and they somehow managed to make 4.4 arrests for every household in 2020. This might just might be among the best case studies for abolishing the police.

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i know that “don’t harass people for being weird, they might be autistic!” is a fairly popular take on here. but as a Certified Autist, i’d like to add that harassing allistic and/or neurotypical people for being weird is also bad, and should not be done

and before you come in with “yeah, you never know who is and isn’t autistic, and you shouldn’t force people to out themselves!” i want to say two things: one, i agree. and two, even if you could magically avoid ever harassing a single autistic person, it still wouldn’t be okay to go after NTs for being weird. they’re people, janice. they’re allowed to be really invested in naruto

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see I think that terfs have made the “criteria” for being a woman so thin that not even they can fit into it & in turn it causes them to not only go at each other’s throats & create chambers of self loathing

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people who uwu-ify south park are the fandom version of a mad scientist pushing their experients further and further beyond what should be possible until it becomes monsterous and unkillable

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Nothing like a bit of royalist ecofascism.

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Some dude in 2020: You should not judge a historical figure, a man from the past, by the modern ethics! He was a product of his time. 500 years ago his actions were completely normal! It’s present-ism, we can’t judge… bla-bla-bla…

People from 500 years ago: Oh my, this guy is such a bastard, a genocidal butcher, a total piece of garbage. Let’s keep records of this douche so people from the future shall hate him too. 

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White museum workers + archeologists: It's complicated 🥺🥺🥺 We can't simply give stolen stuff back and it's not us who are responsible

Me cracking my whip: Boohoo, load the stuff onto the truck