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I was a queer kid in the 90’s/early 00’s. Here’s some shit I dealt with when I got a haircut that made the kids and adults around me decide I wasn’t performing my gender correctly anymore.

A friend and I were hanging out in her front yard, minding our own business, when older girls walked by and started harassing us for being lesbians because I had a pixie haircut.

I was 9.

My friend was 7.

We had been riding our bikes up and down her driveway.

Neither of us knew what a lesbian was at the time. We still understood that they meant us psychological and physical harm.

Her mom stepped in, thank goodness and brought it up to their adult.

It made me mad that they had thrown things at us and were just getting scolded, so I went home. I was later lectured that my “silence and leaving” was the wrong move. I was expected to stay there and wait for their insincere apology.

On a separate occasion from the same year, different older girls tried to stop me from entering a changing room (and were violent about it) at a public pool. Also because of the haircut. Again, an adult intervened before it got to bad, but it happened. They continued to make me uncomfortable in the changing room once I’d gotten access. I’ve posted about this one before.

Also that year, a girl in my class, who had been my friend, turned into a bully overnight. When I confronted her about it, she told me it was because I got the haircut. She didn’t care why I got the haircut. I decided that was a dumb reason to suddenly be mean to someone you’d previously gotten along with and wrote her off as a bad person actually.

This same year, I weaponized the “misgendering” (turns out it wasn’t but I didn’t know that much less anyone else at the time) to convince my mom that she needed to let me get my ears pierced so that the misgendering would stop. I reinforced this by wearing my brother’s old clothes exclusively from my hand-me-down wardrobe. Sure enough, strangers “misgendered” me left and right and it drove her nuts.

Imagine the increase of vitriol I got from classmates and other kids who knew my name and assigned gender. It wasn’t pleasant.

She finally agreed to let me pierce my ears. I went back to wearing whatever clothes, masculine or feminine in nature. Random adults stopped misgendering me to my mother. Kids did not stop taunting and bullying me.

(None of the previous stories occurred during the “boys clothes only” era. I had been wearing clearly feminine clothing designed for 9 year olds in the other examples of homophobia in the 90’s/early 00’s.)

About a year or so later, I decide to grow my hair back out. I was still bullied relentlessly during that time, but suddenly it was because I liked to sing and didn’t have access to TV at home instead of my hair and not presenting my gender correctly. Wild.

Later in my childhood, I went back to a pixie cut without issue, but I had also beaten up several kids twice my size and gotten them expelled for it without being in trouble myself, so idk if it’s because kids realized messing with me REALLY want worth it anymore or if attitudes towards haircuts had loosened a little.

By then, I’d also realized I was at least one type of queer and was friends with all the other queer kids. I broke a few hands and teeth of bullies on their behalf as well.

The teasing didn’t stop for a lot of them, but it significantly dropped for all of us.

Again, don’t know if that’s because I stopped taking shit or if life had gotten a bit better.

Doesn’t change how homophobic kids had been to me in elementary school.

[help-help-i-need-an-adult]

In a press conference held by the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza earlier today, they confirmed that they estimate 10,000 missing people remain missing under the rubble and that, with their very limited means right now, in order to be able to locate and exhume these bodies, the operation could take up to three years. Until then, these 10,000 are not counted among the casualties.

As summer approaches, the trapped bodies are going to be a major source of illnesses and epidemics are expected to spread. Already, there are 20,000 cases of hepatitis in Gaza.

All of this of course is made infinitely more difficult by Israel blocking fuel from entering while it continues to target civil defence vehicles. As a matter of fact, Rafah now has only 3 functioning fire trucks according to a Palestinian Civil Defence spokesperson.

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University of Texas at Austin students standing their ground against the state troopers sent by Governor Greg Abbott to suppress the campus protests

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fucking cop texting someone "I thought we shot someone" at columbia campus

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It’s a thing that Americans haven’t figured out that we don’t have rights and freedom actually and haven’t for a long time.

It makes being here even harder.

“Their protest was wrong because it blocked traffic and was inconvenient to individuals who aren’t the problem.”

You don’t understand what a protest is.

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"The trolley problem makes you ethically complacent because it releases you from a third option" the Trolley Problem is a fucking thought experiment, idiot, and a real-life comparison to matters where you DO NOT HAVE A THIRD FUCKING OPTION.

Shut the fuck up, oh my god.

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yesterday this girl in my academic writing class sits down next to me and puts 3 bananas on the desk (which was jarring by itself) and i had two bananas in my backpack so i wanted to see if she would notice if i added those to her banana pile when she wasn’t looking and when she finally looked back at the bananas she sighed and said really quietly to herself “oh my god…i have so many…” and put all five of them in her backpack

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You don’t say.

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my mom hung up some clothes of mine on the doorframe and it seriously could not convey more "this guy dresses like a cartoon bully" if it got up and stole a kids lunch money

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34,000 deaths is clearly an appalling undercount when watchdog groups learn about mass graves like this every week.

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I just think its really fucking cool that we get to live on maybe the only planet that has total solar eclipses, and that we live here during the cosmic window of time when solar eclipses look the coolest (and happen at all.)

They are not inevitable, they are not forever. They are a weird, beautiful, temporary coincidence and we are so fucking lucky that we get to experience them.

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Behind the Music 🎤 (This was a short video born after Joan brought it to my attention lol)

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The Rafah invasion would be so catastrophic that even Biden momentarily called it a red line, though of course he walked it back.

It's hard to say something could be worse than what's already happened, nothing I could say wouldn't already apply, but this would massively increase the scale of this ongoing atrocity. Any pressure that can be brought to bear to stop it must be applied.