#between we’re just like you and erasure of culture?

[princessmuk]

Here is the most simple problem every human experiences: If you are not familiar with X group, then any individual member of that group must represent the whole.

Your sister likes horses? Well, every girl must like horses then.

You meet someone from a different country that has a strange quirk? Well, everyone from that country must be like that.

Your gay friend is bad at math? Well, every gay person must be bad at math.

Your friend of X race has great skin? Well, every member of that race must have great skin, too.

This happens to everyone. Everyone. Trying to act like it doesn’t happen to you just stops you from examining your biases. And yeah, when you learn more about the world, it can be easy to make assumptions so you can more easily understand and interact with it. Cultural customs, trends, and characteristics are useful.

But with assumption comes bias and prejudice. And assumptions cannot lead you forever.

That is why you need to delve deeper. Expose yourself to different cultures and ways of thinking. Meet people who are different than you. Listen to them. Find media from their cultures, separate the stereotypes from the culture.

One does not represent the whole. Every human being is unique.

[pr0ud0fmyroots]

Trans masculine / butch erasure in Filipino culture

To start off, my name is Rin and I’m a Filipino trans man of Ilokano and Bikolano heritage. Despite being born and raised in Wales, my parents immersed me in our culture. The Filipino adults around me were prejudiced, amused and tolerant of queer people in equal measures. The only queer Filipino representation I had were ‘mga bakla’, the closest English translation being: those assigned male at birth (AMAB) who have adopted a feminine gender expression. There were ‘tomboys’ too: those assigned female at birth (AFAB) who have a masculine expression. But tomboys were seen as just women and they didn’t get nearly as much acknowledgement or representation. So I thought than in order to be queer I had to fit into either of those groups. Except I didn’t. Not quite. Even after months of being out as a trans man to many Filipinos in the local community, I have yet to meet another guy like myself. Someone who existed in that precarious, invisible space. The space that Filipino butches and trans masculine folk were put in.

I’m not sure if there’s much use in trying to justify why we’re invisible. You could attribute it to misogyny, or maybe the prevalence of mga bakla in pre colonial Philippines as ‘babaylans’; those who act as a bridge between the divine and humans. Instead I think we should try to amplify the voices of butch / trans masculine Filipinos. So if you identify as such, leave me a message, an ask, or simply interact with this post and show people that, yes, we’re here. And we’re here to stay!

[nerdygaymormon]

Queer Religious Songs

I was interested to see the news that a song by the drag queen Flamy Grant was top of the iTunes Christian chart. I listened to the song and really like it. 

There are many religious songs I like, but these queer ones speak to a part of me that the others don’t, they ask questions that are important. 

1983 - Church of the Poison Mind : Culture Club - A religious gay man has found love, but because of what he was taught at church, can’t resolve his own feelings about being gay. The message is if you’re living in a culture distorted by prejudice, take a chance on joy–embrace love, whatever form it takes.

1987 - It’s a Sin : Pet Shop Boys - This song is about a person’s lifelong feelings of shame and guilt, presumably for being taught that being gay is a sin. For everything I long to do, no matter when or where or who, has one thing in common, too. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a sin.

1988 - A Little Respect : Erasure - In this song the gay singer is calling to a lover not to leave and asks the question, what religion or reason could drive a man to forsake his lover? So often the religions we’re raised in are anti-queer and people have a tough time breaking from the prejudice when they have their first romantic relationship.

1991 - Losing My Religion : R.E.M. - Lead singer Michael Stipe had declined to address his sexuality, so when “Losing My Religion” came out, people assumed Stipe was coming out as gay. Consider this the hint of the century. Consider this the slip. It stands as a classic example of queer coding in the era of “don’t-ask-don’t-tell.” The song was interpreted as the struggle of a closeted gay man coming to terms with what his religion taught about gay people.

1992 - One : U2 - Bono explained that “It’s a father-and-son story. I tried to write about someone I knew who was coming out and was afraid to tell his father. It’s a religious father and son… I have a lot of gay friends, and I’ve seen them screwed up from unloving family situations, which just are completely anti-Christian. If we know anything about God, it’s that God is love.” Knowing it’s a gay son who is talking to his unaccepting dad, the lyrics really hit hard. Did I disappoint you or leave a bad taste in your mouth? And also these words from the chorus, We’re one but we’re not the same. Well we hurt each other then we do it again. It seems eventually the son decides to draw a boundary and remove his father from his life - I can’t keep holding on to what you got, 'cause all you got is hurt. I like that the lyrics say We get to carry each other, carry each other, we are different and may not agree on everything, but we choose to help each other, it’s asking us to find ways to have our relationship work even though we’re different.

1997 - You Have Been Loved : George Michael - George Michael wrote this song about Anselmo Feleppa, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1993. While an intense song about grief and death, it also involves a spiritual struggle. Anselmo and his mother both say that God is not dead, George counters by challenging What’s the use in pressing palms, if you [God] won’t keep such love from harm? It’s a cruel world. You’ve so much to prove.

1997 - Together Again : Janet Jackson - The album notes say “I dedicate the song ‘Together Again’ to the friends I’ve lost to AIDS.” It’s a sweet song with hopeful words. Everywhere I go, every smile I see, I know you are there smilin’ back at me.

2011 - Born This Way : Lady Gaga - Many songs hint at queer identities and acceptance by using metaphors, but not this one, it is direct. No matter gay, straight, or bi, lesbian, transgender life, I’m on the right track, baby, I was born to survive. The song is a real celebration of who we each are made to be. God makes no mistakes.

2011 - We All Try : Frank Ocean - Frank Ocean sings of losing faith in mankind as the LGBTQIA+ community struggles to find acceptance. I believe that marriage isn’t between a man and woman, but between love and love, and I believe you when you say you’ve lost all faith, but you must believe in something. He reassures the listeners and the LGBTQIA+ community that I just don’t believe we’re wicked, I know that we sin but I do believe we try.

2012 - Same Love : Macklemore & Ryan Lewis feat. Mary Lambert - Macklemore sings against the homophobia taught at church. When I was in church, they taught me something else. If you preach hate at the service, those words aren't anointed and that Holy Water that you soak in is then poisoned. The song concludes with Mary singing I’m not crying on Sundays, which I think means not letting religious intolerance and churches harm us anymore, not subjecting ourselves to those words anymore.

2012 - Origin of Love : MIKA - Mika said this song “talks about my life, it talks about the church, it talks about falling in love and it talks about being happy and proud about falling in love with whoever you fall in love with, even if it’s a man. So in a way, this is my statement and my thank you to the man I love.“ To his partner he sings You are the sun and the light, you are the freedom I fight, God will do nothing to stop it.

Mika contrasts the goodness romance brings to his life with how the Bible introduces heterosexual relationships: Like stupid Adam and Eve, they found their love in a tree. God didn’t think they deserved it. He taught them hate, taught them pride, gave them a leaf, made them hide. Let’s push their stories aside. You know the origin is you.

2013 – Take Me to Church : Hozier - The lyrics are against church-fueled homophobia and persecution of queer people, and instead Hozier finds meaning by worshiping in the bedroom. Many queer people can identify with these lyrics: Every Sunday’s getting more bleak, a fresh poison each week. "We were born sick", you heard them say it. Hozier explained that churches undermine humanity as they teach shame about sexual orientation by saying that it is sinful or that it offends God. Hozier is an outspoken LGBTQ+ ally and the music video depicts two gay men being ripped apart by homophobic violence in Russia. It brought international attention to the anti-gay laws in Russia.

2015 - No Place in Heaven : MIKA - Mika is singing about how religion teaches there’s no place in heaven for gay people because the way we love is sinful. Father, won’t you forgive me for my sins? Father, if there’s a heaven let me in.

2016 - Son of a Preacher Man : Tom Goss - This 1968 song gets a gay update. The video tells the story of two gay teens struggling to understand their feelings for one another while operating within the confines of an evangelical church.

2016 - Trash : Tyler Glenn - In response to the Nov 2015 Policy of Exclusion by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Tyler created this video denouncing the Church’s restrictive view of same-sex relationships. The pain and anger are so raw in this video, it hurts to watch. These lyrics are an indictment, that he’d repent his days away if we wanted him to stay, but we throw him out like trash. If this is God’s church then there should be room for ALL God’s children.

2016 - Shameless : Tyler Glenn - The video has an old man in a black suit & white shirt tied up to a chair as Tyler sings You judge, but I don’t give a damn. I live a life so shameless. He lists things he does shamelessly now that once he would’ve been judged for: porn, one-night stands, alcohol. Tyler has now left the church and is not letting old men in suits make him feel shame.

2016 - G.D.M.M.L. Grls : Tyler Glenn - Despite the best efforts by this gay man to make church work, it didn’t because God Didn’t Make Me Like Girls.

2016 - Heaven : Troye Sivan feat. Betty Who - Troye sings candidly about what it’s like for a religious teenager to come out as gay. Without losing a piece of me, how do I get to heaven? Without changing a part of me, how do I get to heaven? All my time is wasted, feeling like my heart’s mistaken, oh, so if I’m losing a piece of me, maybe I don’t want heaven? Troye explains “When I first started to realise that I might be gay, I had to ask myself all these questions—these really really terrifying questions. Am I ever going to find someone? Am I ever going to be able to have a family? If there is a God, does that God hate? If there is a heaven, am I ever going to make it to heaven?” The video features footage from LGBTQ+ protests throughout history.

2016 - Sudden Death (OMG) : Tyler Glenn - In this song, Tyler expresses the initial shock of his faith crisis. I never asked to fall from grace. Catch me I’m starting to fall! Don’t know what all this is for! Keep comin’ at me with your disrespect. You went and started a war. Now I don’t care any more. I keep on living like it’s sudden death.

2016 - Devil : Tyler Glenn - A song that highlights the conflict between religious belief and queerness. I found myself when I lost my faith and not being able to pray the gay away. The constant in his world, what he’s anchoring himself to, is that his mom still loves him, and that’s important because studies show the acceptance & love of a parent makes a huge difference when someone comes out.  

2016 - Queer Gospel : Erin McKeown - This song was written in response to the ongoing trend of "religious freedom" legislation being passed by some US states. Love us as we are. See us and we're holy. In this shall we shall ever be, wholly ourselves.

2016 - Midnight : Tyler Glenn - The Neon Trees frontman gives an emotional song about his departure from the Mormon church but not from God. The ballad is accompanied by a video that shows Glenn removing his religious garments and replacing them with a glittery jacket, which is such a powerful metaphor.

2017 - The Village : Wrabel - There are lyrics in this song of what religious people have told him, and boy do they hurt. They say, 'Don't dare, don't you even go there, cutting off your long hair. You do as you're told' Tell you, ‘Wake up, go put on your makeup, this is just a phase you're gonna outgrow.’ There’s a line in the song that hits me hard: One line in the Bible isn’t worth a life. The video is beautiful, very poignant, it breaks my heart and gives me hope. 

2017 - Pray : Sam Smith - You won’t see Sam in church, but they say they’re a child of God at heart and they’re begging God to show them a way. I'm not a saint, I'm more of a sinner. I don't wanna lose, but I fear for the winners.

2017 - HIM : Sam Smith - This is a song about a boy in Mississippi coming out and the conflict between his sexuality and his religious upbringing. He is grappling with the feeling that there’s no place in church for him because he’s gay. The “Him” being sung is used both for God and for a boy he likes. Holy Father, we need to talk. I have a secret that I can't keep. I'm not the boy that you thought you wanted. Please don't get angry, have faith in me.

2018 - Explaining Jesus : Jordy Searcy - Jordy grew up playing music with his family and in his church. In 2014, Jordy landed a spot on NBC’s The Voice. In this song, Searcy is apologizing for how poorly we have been “Explaining Jesus” to others. He begins by singing If you're gay and over 85, you've felt for your whole life, that when God made you, he just messed up. The song ends with And I'm so sorry for all the wrongs. We're broken singers with broken songs. We paint our pride and call it truth. I'm sorry no one explained Jesus to you.

2019 - Hey Jesus : Trey Pearson - Trey made headlines in 2016 when, as the lead singer of the Christian rock band Everyday Sunday, he came out as gay. Three years later and Trey has a question: Hey Jesus can you hear me now? It’s been awhile since I came out, I was wonderin’ do you love me the same? As a person who struggles to reconcile faith with sexual orientation, I find this song quite moving. 

2020 - God Loves Me Too : Brian Falduto - Brian played the gay kid in the movie School of Rock. Now as an adult, Brian is back and singing a song that no one has to earn God’s love. Brian wrote the song after visiting a church that was welcoming and accepting of queer people. I look around and see I’ve found a place where peace and love abound. I’ve waited my whole life for the truth. It is true, God loves you. It don’t matter if you’re LGBTQ.

2020 - Chasing Rainbows : Big Freedia feat. Kesha - Freedia is a gay Black man who carries a purse and uses “he” and “she” pronouns. Kesha is bi. Together they put out an uplifting song. Freedia lists the various ways she’s been put down throughout her life by schoolyard bullies, religious figures and record labels. Kesha makes clear we won’t be put down any longer when she sings You know me, bein’ free. Won’t be silent, I pray for my enemies. 

2020 - Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America : The 1975 - This song has Matty Healy pondering religious faith and love from his perspective as a queer person and describes hiding his sexual identity because of his religious beliefs. Phoebe Bridgers, who is bisexual, contributes a fragile and vulnerable verse. She sings of her love for the girl next door. Her love is unrequited as she is unable to reveal her true feelings to her neighbor.

2020 - Orphans of God : Ty Herndon & Kristin Chenoweth feat. Paul Cardall - The message of the song is that there are no orphans of God. We are all loved, we are all thought about, we are all created equally and God loves us all just the same. Ty Herndon is a country singer who came out as gay in 2014

2021 - I Know it Hurts : Paul Cardall & Tyler Glenn - This makes me think of a queer person coming to recognize their insecure place in church, how all those negative teachings were about you. I just wanted to believe, but how am I supposed to believe this about me? And then we find each other, queer believers who can understand what we’re going through, who know the hurt and the teachings and comments. For most queer people, they leave church and go on a different path. They’re not lost, a faint light at the end is guiding their way, they’re finding another way back home.

2021 - It’s a Sin : Elton John and Years & Years - This arrangement of the 1987 song by the Pet Shop Boys was recorded by the gay icons Elton John and Years & Years for the 2021 Brit Awards. The words are about a person’s lifelong feelings of shame and guilt for being taught that being gay is a sin. 

2021 - Born this Way (The Country Road Version) : Orville Peck - For the 10th anniversary of this iconic song, gay singer Orville gives it a country music makeover

2022 - Good Day (feat. Derek Webb) : Flamy Grant - Matthew Blake was a worship leader for 22 years who has become a “shame-slaying, hip-swaying, singing-songwriting drag queen” named Flamy Grant. The lyrics talks of coming back to church after having left for feeling oppressed. They’ve come back to church because despite what some say, God’s love is expansive enough for everyone. God made me good in every way, so I raise my voice to celebrate a good day. This song hit #1 on the iTunes Christian chart.

2022 - If I Was Gay : Andreas Wijv - 29 year old Swedish singer and model Andreas Wijk wrote this song and debuted it in a TikTok video where he plays it for his parents as his way of coming out. It’s a vulnerable song that many will relate to. If I was gay would I be what they say, just a stereotype? If I was gay how do I get to heaven when there’s “no church in the wild”?

2023 - Faith : Semler - Grace Semler Baldridge performs by the name Semler and is genderqueer and nonbinary. Semler grew up with a dad who was a pastor in the Episcopal Church, and sings of how the rejection of their identity by the church left them scarred. When my religion turned against me, they said my hopes and dreams were faulty. I showed these holes inside my hands, and they claimed they couldn’t see. Even as they struggled with the church, Semler kept a relationship with Jesus and found they flourished far more than they did in church, and now the thought of going back to a church is unappealing. But I don’t wanna get small to be in those rooms. After singing about their religion turning against them, we hear the lyrics Our God is good and able, and our God is flipping tables at the mess of love we made a religion that often didn’t accept their identity. This song was released in June and before Pride month was over it reached the top of the iTunes Christian music chart.

2024 - Hell Together : David Archuleta - This is a song of David’s experience at church as a gay person: Bow your head, don’t be bold. You’ll survive by doin’ what you’re told. It became too much and he worries what his mom would think if he leaves the church: All I want is to make you proud. If I would run, would I let you down? In response, she replies: “If I have to live without you. I don’t wanna live forever in someone else’s heaven. So let 'em close the gates. Oh, if they don’t like the way you’re made, then they’re not any better. If Paradise is pressurе, oh, we’ll go to hell togethеr.” A beautiful story of a mom supporting her queer child. In response to his mom, he answers that he’s worried about what’s ahead but is confident to take those steps together: You and me, that’s all we need. Blood is thicker than the pages that they read. I’m afraid (I’m afraid) of letting go, of the version that I used to know. I’m not crying, you are.

[tobi-smp]

Can I ask your opinion on something?

Do you think being poly makes you queer? Not necessarily LGBT+, just queer. I’ve seen a few of people say no, and I’m really wondering what you might think, because you talk about this kind of thing a lot and seem really knowledgeable on it

So sorry if this bothers you!!!

To address the end of this ask and your follow up ask first: you have nothing to worry about, I don't mind questions like this at all (though it was a bit of a surprise to see it’d been sent here rather than my main). you just happened to message me while I was in the car so I couldn't respond right away!

that said, there is no point in gatekeeping against people who are marginalized by our amatonormative cishet society from the Marginalized Sexual Romantic And Gender Identities Group. literally everybody benefits from solidarity and nobody is helped by exclusionism, there Is no upside to looking at someone’s suffering and saying that it’s not important enough, that it’s not good enough, or that it doesn’t belong to them, or that it doesn’t look enough like you to Count.

so my answer to “should this marginalized identity have a space in our community” has been, in the space of 10 years of me having an opinion on it, a Unanimous Yes.

to talk on polyamory in particular, it’s genuinely ridiculous to me that it’s even in question in the first place.

1: polyamorous people are Legally discriminated against, with marriage being solely monogamous. this has all of the same problems that are tied to gay marriage being illegal. there’s the mundane of taxes and the extreme of partners being barred from their loved ones in medical emergencies, but it goes even further than that. landlords denying people the right to roommates that aren’t legal partners or family members, for instance.

2: polyamorous people are Religiously discriminated against, with the christian mindset being that marriage is intended to be between One Man and One Woman. many religious zealots view polyamory as just as other, just as deviant, just as Sinful as they view gayness.

3: polyamorous people are Socially discriminated against, with even non-religious people viewing it as other, questionable, or even Immoral because monogamy is the dominant cultural standard. you’ll see the same arguments used to demonize and pathologize gayness used against polyamory, often times without people even realizing that these two mindsets are comparable. that the same societal standards that deem that heterosexuality is “normal” (heteronormativity) also creates the idea that monogamy is “normal” (amatonormativity).

and on top of all of this, polyamorous people face Erasure and Misinformation propagated By the society that stigmatizes and discriminates against them.

now, I greatly dislike the idea that we need to line up a list of oppression stats in order for a marginalized identity to “count” or to Belong in our communities, but I bring all of this up because having solidarity with other marginalized communities is the most effective way for marginalized people to gain the social power needed to combat systemic, legal, and social discrimination. 

when we say “x marginalized group doesn’t belong in our communities Because” what we’re saying is “x marginalized group Deserves To Be Stripped Of Their Ability To Fight Back Against Discrimination Because I Do Not Want To Defend Them.” which is both Cruel, and Ridiculous on account of the fact that Solidarity Goes Both Ways.

allowing polyamorous people within queer spaces means that polyamorous people will be heard and protected within our communities, but it Also means that polyamorous people will be there to Hear And Protect Their Fellow Community Members. that is literally the Point of community. which is why, like I’ve already said, there is literally no downside to inclusivity and there is literally no upside to exclusivity. we Strip Away our power as a community by cutting ourselves up and gatekeeping who can and cannot add to the pot.

on another note, I’d like to address something that was small within the ask, but that I have a lot to say about:

on a personal level people are allowed to identify with certain terms and communities and not others. if someone wants to be queer and not lgbt+ or lgbt+ and not queer then they should be allowed to, it’s as much a choice on community and acceptance and comfort as the choice of identifying as pan vs bi is.

but the idea that as a Community we can or Should decide which marginalized identities “count” as lgbt+ vs “just queer” At All is absolutely outrageous to me. and I don’t say this against you anon, it’s clear you’ve seen people talking about this and are now trying to understand it conceptually. but from a fundamental level it is Absurd.

the point of “queer” as a label and as a community is both in radical acceptance and in rejection of the status quo. which means it’s very appealing for marginalized identities and presentations that face backlash even within lgbt+ spaces. 

but this fact Doesn’t mean that these identities Should be excluded from lgbt+ spaces, it doesn’t mean that we Should be allowing people to gatekeep the lgbt+ community. the idea that a marginalized orientation could belong to one but not the other is giving the lgbt+ community to exclusionists, it’s Giving control of these spaces and communities over to bigotry and lateral aggression. 

nobody should be Forced to use any labels that they don’t want to claim, nobody should be Forced to align with a community that they don’t want to be apart of, but that Also means ensuring that we leave all of these labels and communities open to anyone who Does want to align with them.

[ursie]

genuine question: if devin wrote dick as romani in a hurtful way, why does fandom seem so intent to keeping him romani while decrying the writer that made him romani in the first place? like, if it came from such racist/hurtful archetypes then why cling to it so much? (in contrast, i've seen people say that headcanoning tim as asian is bad because of sterotypes, which is why i don't understand the difference.) i barely read past the 80s comics i grew up with, i just read a ton of fandom arguments and the contrast between "dick IS romani" vs "tim ISN'T asian" is like. i don't understand it? i know fandom isn't a monolith but there are trends overall. idk, i figured you seemed like a "safe" person to ask this question in good faith. hope it doesn't upset you! thanks for taking the time to read and/or answer this. <3

Ok so the thing is bad rep is worse than no rep-yes but erasure is worse too so the solution isn’t to erase but to fix it and there has been genuine effort in canon and by Romani people in the fandom to address Dicks rep. While it’s undeniably rooted in some stereotypes there’s also no denying how important Dicks character is. He’s undeniably the most popular Roma character of all time and that’s an issue when people won’t acknowledge he’s Roma. He’s multifaceted and smart and brave and complicated and undeniably good ect these are really good characteristics for any character let alone one to represent any group of people. The best thing dc could do is either hire Roma writers (or Roma editors/sensitivity readers/ect) they need Roma people in the workroom not less Roma characters in comics. Because at the end of the day If we wait for perfect rep before we acknowledge it we’re not going to get it and that goes for any marginalized identity. People cannot know other’s peoples lived experience-which is why we need to push for our voices in the room. Almost all the diverse characters in comics nowadays started as stereotypes and were stereotypes til someone said no and chose to do the work so they could write them better or at least try-that’s what needs to be done. I think it’s funny (and this isn’t at you) that with Dick given his importance given his cultural influence people push for erasure due to some writing flaws when that’s not and never been the case canon or fanon for other characters I mean have you read early black panther? It’s not good. I think people need to reflect if they actually have an issue with how he’s written or if they not only don’t want to view him as Roma but don’t want to put in their own work of looking past the stereotypes either. Also tbh while you’ll see people tote that Roma people don’t like his rep (which I’m not saying there’s none who don’t) the posts that are most commonly referenced are by non Romani people (and one is by a total freak so yeah). In current canon Dick is probably about 1/4th “ethnically” Roma (though that hardly matters he’s Roma hes roma like. Roma is a race he’s just not white) but also in preboot, dick's father was a kalderash-american rom, dick also spoke lovari dialect in preboot. as of post flashpoint, dick's mom is an american roma but her vitsa is not confirmed, so i just like to hc john was kalderash and mary was lovara personally 🥰 like again the best thing dc can do is actually talk about the Graysons, Mary’s family, ect and make them human. Make them more than stereotypes. Actually talk about his culture and his family and his people-not just brush it under a rug until they reference it for diversity points later

As for your other question/point to me the difference between hcing a character as a different race vs like Dick is the push to view white characters as non white instead of actually making fan content of canon non white characters? Like it’s almost a white guilt thing w Tim (this is not at fans of color) but like you want to feel good about stanning characters of color but you also. Don’t actually stan a character of color (like Tim or Jason for instance) so you just hc them as non white (and yes often stereotypically) instead of like reading a single comic w Duke in it. Like racebending is fine and I think it’s good but when done by white fans it’s often actually done to like justify their distance from actual canon characters of color. Like I’m glad you think Tim’s Asian but you still won’t draw fanart of the batfam w Duke in it in 2022 yknow? You still prioritize Jason over Cass but you think he’s Latine, you hc Steph as ambiguously brown but you still characterize Damian in a racist manner, ect. Does that make sense I’m not actually sure I’m explaining well. Oh and in the case you specified Dick is canonically non white wheras Tim isn’t-and it should be noted that white isn’t the baseline-While no one’s saying writers had any intentions he was never stated to be white before-him being “retconned” as Roma isn’t really fair or true he was simply revealed to be so as again white cannot be treated as the inherent norm (nor should heterosexuality and being cisgender or able bodied) I’m not saying you’re wrong but I think it’s important not to think about that kind of stuff in those terms if that makes sense. I hope I cleared this up. I certainly tried and should you have any more questions my inbox/dms are open

Edit : adding on an important response from @royharper : the bottom line is that people who aren't roma should not be speaking on his identity as a rom because they have no idea what roma identity fully entails. i've seen people claim "he's not culturally connected, therefore he can't be roma" or "he can be white and roma, he's not a person of color" when neither of these things are true. for one, while devin is inconsistent in her writing, dick is shown to be raised within the culture as far back as her titans run in the late 90's, in which he is shown to be speaking romanes with his father in a dream sequence that is heavily implied to be a flashback of sorts, and as well lian states that dick can speak romanes when discussing the various languages that her dad, aunts, and uncles can speak. language /is/ culture for us, it's not something that any outsider can just learn super easily. it was really strange that she retconned this herself by the time gotham knights was written a few years later through the character yoska, who attempts to speak romanes with dick and finds that he can't understand him, however using this, along with the orientalist stereotypes devin tried to impose on both dick and yoska when writing about roma identity, as an excuse to say that dick is not "really a rom" is racist. outsiders do not understand the nuances of roma identity enough to make that judgement, and no, wikipedia is not an accurate source for information about roma. touching on the idea that roma can be white, this is a misconception. while outsiders may be folded into the community by marriage or adoption, this is not very common because we don't tend to marry or adopt outside of our communities. furthermore, roma is not an ethnicity. roma is our race. our ethnicities are our clans. there are roma with pale skin, there are even roma that appear white, but they are still racially roma and are still subject to racial discrimination. in response to the idea that there is an outpouring of roma fans who don't want dick to be roma at all, this simply isn't true. that rumor was originally started by someone who was outed as a racefaker, and is perpetuated by white fans who seek to weaponize this perspective to justify their whitewashing and racism. i've known more roma who were, while still critical of devin's orientalism/antiromanyism, ecstatic to have a roma comic character who actually speaks the language, as in comparison to doctor doom and the maximoff twins, who are arguably just as popular, who do not speak romanes in comics, or have only spoken one or two words of the language. dick is important in terms of representation for this fact alone. i can't fathom the amount of people who are not roma who think that just because roma characters are often subject to stereotypical writing that it's somehow better to simply erase their racial identity all together rather than doing their own research to avoid stereotypes when portraying the characters and pushing for these companies to start hiring roma creatives as we do with /every other character of color because not a SINGLE character of color in comics history has been entirely free of racist, stereotypical writing or of colorism and whitewashing in official artwork/. and yet you don't see people pushing for other characters of color to be made white. it's really very telling to me. and just for the record, since i know this is for some reason a popular talking point, dick's race was not retconned after devin initially wrote him as roma. his race has been referenced across numerous other comics written by other writers over the years, most notably tim seeley in his run of nightwing rebirth. while i have issues with seeley's characterization of dick, and he tends to sexualize him just as much if not more than devin imo, dick's racial identity plays a big role in the raptor arc. stop acting like devin was the only writer to ever write dick as a rom and that it was never seen or heard of again in canon after she stopped working on nightwing.

[solreefs]

The Beauty of Unlabeled Things: Your Local Nonbinary Aro-Spec’s Take on Aziraphale and Crowley

or alternatively, Oh My Fucking God Stop With the Good Omens Queerbaiting Discourse Already

*disclaimer: shipping these two is not inherently aphobic or transphobic. that being said, if you romantically ship them purely because you think of them as not queer enough in canon, or don’t consider nb or aspec people queer, with all due disrespect, fuck you.*

Let’s start with the obvious: Good Omens is a comedy about an angel and a demon trying to stop the apocalypse, not a romance novel. It has never been sold or summarized as a romance novel. You were never promised a romantic relationship. Remember that.

Crowley and Aziraphale are presented to us as, quote, “men, or at least men-shaped creatures, of the world”. The implication being, they’re supernatural divine beings, so while they might like to look like men, but do they really have time for our human concepts of gender? Probably not. They have bigger things to worry about anyway. So right off the bat, we’re told we can’t put human labels on these two, because they’re not human. It just doesn’t work. It’s like trying to classify humans as dog breeds. Yes, you can match up some traits, but fundamentally, such labels are incorrect, and always will be.

And that ambiguity carries over to their relationship with each other. The best part of their relationship is that it has no definitive labels other than “an Arrangement”. They care for each other, and see no need to define what they have beyond that. Why do they need to explain it to other people? Isn’t the fact that this relationship works for them the most important part? They don’t need to care what other people think. And therein lies the beauty of this relationship, and in a way, of this book as a whole.

Good Omens was not written to be the beloved cultural phenomenon it has become. If you read the forward of the book, it was just a fun summer project. As such, it wasn’t written with other people’s opinions in mind. It is a weird, funny, and at times strangely thought-provoking book that simply does what it does, without much care for explaining itself any more than is necessary to tell a good story. Things don’t always need labels, or lengthy explanations, or to fit into neat little socially acceptable boxes of conventionality, and Good Omens is a book that celebrates that.

How quickly so many people forget the inherent queerness of unlabeled relationships, people and beings of ambiguous genders, and love that doesn’t quite fit into a neat, acceptable, nicely defined category. When you say “is Good Omens gay?”, what it sounds like to me is “this is a romance between two cisgender men, right?” It sounds like nonbinary and aromantic erasure. It sounds like ignoring the beauty of queer as an ambiguous, unifying label of all that falls outside the heterosexual, heteromantic, cisgender norm of today’s society. Quite fucking frankly, it sounds like entitlement and ignorance.

Unlabeled queer people are queer. Aro people are queer. Nonbinary people are queer. Not every queer relationship has to be romantic in nature. There are other kinds of queer representation besides kissing and romance that are just as important. Good Omens was not sold as a gay romance novel, stop treating it like one. And as a nonbinary aro-spec person, I am so tired of the way the internet treats people like me in fiction.

I also want to close with this Twitter thread, which encapsulates my thoughts on the ship itself quite nicely:

[ID: A Twitter thread that reads as follows:

Beans Turnip (@Hatpire): So, @neilhimself, they’re gay, right? :D

Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself): They’re an angel and a demon, not male humans.

🖤Rhiannon🖤 (@GoodnightSkye): Okay, but they love each other, right? :D

Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself): Absolutely.

End ID]

[uncommon-etc]

5 Reasons The Strip nz is... not that bad actually

While media discourse on here tends to just about straddle the divide between the snobbish purity culture of ‘you can only enjoy quality programming’ and ‘let everyone be guilty-pleasure-loving trash’ there do exist a handful of shows and films which we can all collectively agree aren’t great (whether through bad acting, low-quality cinematography, low-budget set-design, lazy story-lines or all of the above) but which have plenty of redeeming features.

I’ve seen posts claiming that The Strip deserves to be lost media (at the time of writing it exists virtually nowhere on the internet, you can watch the first and twelfth episode for free, but the rest of season 1 is only available on vimeo and season 2 may well be lost to the world) but like a lot of shows from the 00s which are routinely mocked for being kind of trashy, it doesn’t deserve to be condemned to the great cultural dustbin.

If you find yourself skipping large chunks of it, or you don’t like the characters, or you cba with the frequent romantic subplots, that’s fine. But there are five reasons The Strip actually deserves some credit:

1. It’s one of the only shows whose narrative continually rewards women for setting reasonable boundaries and calling out men who break them.

The show’s brand of have-it-all white liberal feminism may grate on some, understandably so, but if you’d lived through the tidal wave of misogyny that was TV when I was a kid, you’d find it refreshing too. The majority of guys (and gals) when I was growing up believed that once a woman had ‘led a man on’ enough, whether it was kissing him, getting involved with him, or letting him treat her to things, she was somehow contractually obliged to have sex with him. The view that you should settle for a ‘nice guy’ even if he was extremely flawed, because thinking you deserved better made you a bitch was also quite prevalent. The Strip tackles both of these misconceptions head-on.

2. Its portrayal of bisexuality was way ahead of its time.

We’re still fighting bi-phobia, bi-erasure, and reducing-bi-experiences-to-cheap-laughs a full twenty years on from when The Strip first aired, but the show’s handling of Glenn coming to terms with being bi, telling his ex-wife and daughter, and being open with others in his life about it, was textbook. The show even allowed him to quash common misconceptions by having him explain to a woman who thinks bi = adventurous and experienced in bed, that he’s only ever been with the woman he was married to, and the guy he was seeing for three months after they got divorced, so he’s really no more savvy than the next guy.

3. It provided work for Maori, Samoan, and other Polynesian actors.

Are some of the scenes given to the non-white half of the cast problematic? Absolutely. Adam, the head stripper, probably comes off worst, by featuring frequently in Mel’s fantasies performing the kind of animalistic hypermasculinity which comes pretty close to overt racism in these enlightened times.

But since mainstream Australian and Kiwi TV back then was so incredibly white, the primary roles offered to Polynesian actors were as miserable melancholic underdogs in social realist dramas. If, in 2002, someone had said to you ‘hey, instead of playing homeless alcoholic #5, we’ve got you a part as a series-regular in a sitcom, you’ll be working in a strip-club, but you’ll get plenty of lines, and the chance to play someone with an actual personality’ idk why you wouldn’t be thrilled. One scene even pokes fun at the white savior complex in a big way, which doesn’t excuse all the Adam stuff, but it’s progress I guess. 

4. It promotes found families over nuclear families.

How many workplace comedies have you seen where the workplace consists of a divorced woman in her 30s, her teenage daughter, a gay guy, three Polynesians, a Samoan, a Maori-Jew, and an Australian who tries to out-himbo the lot of them? The entire premise of The Strip is that the conventional family unit of a well-off, successful opposite-sex couple and their kid implodes spectacularly, because it isn’t making anyone happy, while the alternative family structure that replaces it is a joy to behold.

No-one would argue that Mel’s story-line gets far too much screen-time, but, though they’re fleeting, the scenes at the club, with Jack, Samara, Adam, Clint, Mostin, Ian, and Daniel are just a straight-up delight to watch. The writers could have made a very depressing show about a group of people from various oppressed minority groups having to work at a strip-club because they had no choice, instead they chose to show them having fun, forming friendships, hooking up, and generally being there for each other. In fact, I reckon if the writers had chosen to ditch all of the main characters entirely and just made a show about Jack, Sam, and the five male-strippers it would have been a masterpiece revered to this day.

5. Not to objectify on main, but one of the strippers is played by a 26-year-old Taika Waititi, which has been reason enough for many to watch it

You thirsty hoes are still going nuts over one glimpse of his midriff 20 years later, wait until you get a load of this absolute snack:

The irony is that the writers clearly made an executive decision to cast this, then unknown, alternative comic as ‘the funny one’, which explains why Mostin gets a lot more lines than the other four, features in fewer routines, and is treated a bit like an annoying kid-brother by many of the other characters. But in his first appearance (1x07), when he and Sam perform a sexually-charged shirtless Flamenco dance following some very poorly written flirting, you can tell at least one person behind the camera let out a fanfic-worthy ‘Oh.’

On a side-note, this blog supports all male-strippers, and actors playing male-strippers, because if Taika’s ted-talk is to be believed, he started writing the script for Two Cars, One Night while sitting backstage in his g-string wondering what he ought to be doing with his life. Never let it be said that geniuses aren’t found in the unlikeliest of places.   

[thethiefandtheairbender]

also since it’s almost pride month here are some aphobic (ace / aro-phobic) or exclusionist dogwhistles

implying / stating outright that aces are cringy

“i just don’t want people to limit themselves” is basically what one of my family members said to me when i came out, it fucking hurt. don’t do it. you have no idea how much someone has wrestled with their identity

anti / ship policing, bc it’s predicated on purity culture and is a gateway to aphobia

saying that young people can’t be ace and that we’ll change our minds and just haven’t met the right person yet

“nobody cares that you don’t want to have sex” 

saying that aspec people are picky or just want to be special

calling us cishet 

getting upset when a character is headcanoned as ace or aro

only headcanoning characters as ace or aro and never shipping them - platonically or otherwise - with anyone

for that matter, treating ace characters and people like a punchline joke, including historical figures or memes. we’re not a cringe compilation

implying / stating outright that QPRs (queerplatonic relationships) are cringy or “you mean like having friends”

calling our history ahistorical and grasping at straws

reading our experiences and dismissing them as “oh but everyone feels that way” -- i got some news for you, bud

making fun of mogai instead of treating the damn thing with nuance

saying that asexuality or aromantic are a tumblr identity (we’re not and exclusionists destroyed our community here years ago, thanks for that)

aro erasure

“wow you don’t see these two characters as boyfriends because the line between romantic and platonic attraction is blurred for you? you must be homophobic” or “this relationship between two same sex characters that closely resembles a QPR isn’t Good Enough Rep and is homophobic because they didn’t kiss” (see: good omens)

making fun of heterosexual aros, heteromantic aces (particularly women bc you just love misogyny directed at “weird” people), and demisexual/demiromantic people especially

dismissing amatanormativity and saying that it doesn’t exist or isn’t a part of cisheteronormativity that fucks literally everyone up

taking posts clearly made to deride us or denounce as (i.e. aces don’t want kissing at pride, aros think all romance is Yucky) on face value and reblogging them as jokes and “discourse”

joking that it’s dumb/cringey/funny for people to want a queer safe space that isn’t as sexualized as clubs and bars

dismissing the fact that aros and aces experience comphet too (hi, op here: i definitely did and it fucked me up, thanks)

“just because you’re ace doesn’t detract from your gayness” and that only queer aces belong in the community (aceness is inherently queer)

an emphasis on lesbianism as Gold Star Gay (as aces often fell under the lesbian umbrella for similar reasons bi women did, historically) or gatekeeping

aphobic gatekeeping is often very similar to transmed or terf gatekeeping (sincerely an ace, aro trans person); if you can learn how to identify one, you can learn how to identify the other

along that vein, tagging things as q slur. i won’t trust you three separate fronts in case you’re a terf/exclusionist, congratulations

in other words, sincerely from an ace, aro spec, pan, nonbinary person

[violenceenthusiast]

im curious why people are saying supernatural is jewish like idk if jewish writers makes an inherently jewish story especially when things like following out the christian apocalypse from revelations and showing a real physical g-d who is just some guy i think is super jarring since though christians claim to be against idolatry they seem totally fine showing depictions of gd or whatever i dont get jesus honestly but jews are far more strict and the idea of showing gds appearance is pretty wrong

WOOF okay um. Maybe this is one of those Tone Doesn’t Come Thru Well Online things but to me this is soo fucking rude… I’m half way between John Mulaney we don't have time to unpack all of that & Ben Wyatt wait it’s gonna bother me if I don’t explain why you’re wrong. 

This turned into all my thoughts. 

So like. First off, it’s all fun and games. We’re all just joking and joshing and projecting here on destiel dot tumblr dot com and Jupernatural is not an exception in a lot of ways. And so when someone shits on what we’re doing here (yes, even unintentionally) what you get is what happened: oh you think you’re funny well I’m about to be hilarious!!! aka I’m gonna do it even more now out of spite specifically because you said not to. Like it really is all jokes but also you know what’s not a joke? Antisemitism in all its forms, even the casual shit! It’s really draining and it builds up in your veins!! Just. Yeah. You saw a lot of people talking about it today in particular because much like other topics of the day, one thing kicks off a whole other turn of events. So like. one misguided comment that’s playfully antisemitic and then one more little one, and then one big/obvious one launched us (Jewish spn fans) into a whole bigger discussion about antisemitism and erasure of Jews in the spn fandom writ large. It’s one thing to be descriptive, offer a headcanon/what if, or employ a certain mode of analysis. It’s another thing to definitively say This Is The Truth, specifically when to do so overrides something else, especially in this case when what’s being overridden is Jews, an ethnoreligious minority. It’s also another thing to talk over Jews. And mind this has been building for days. Not in a bad way just like, it’s been topical for days and then today one big thing pushed it over the edge to us actually posting abt it (partially bc at that point it’s a pattern, which feels like it needs to be addressed). Like, destiel tumblr is small we pretty much all see all the same posts, and then Jewish spn fans… we’re friends, we chat about life? We joke around together, y’know? If you’re being antisemitic (yes, even unintentionally) we’re all gonna hear abt it. It’s how we stay safe or in this case, curate the online exp.

That being said tho projecting on fiction is like fun and even a good thing at times, and def opens up new modes of analysis. But! the other big thing here is that there IS a LOT of evidence for a Jewish reading of spn, in a lot of ways, and particularly if you know what to look for. Like there’s lots of niche Jewish slang (non-Jews just don’t know these things, and that is a reflection primarily of the writers but once you put it in the script it implies things about the characters too of course), the theology of the early seasons (I’ll get to that in a second), main character motivations (hold on), “Moishe Campbell” implying Mary is (and therefore Sam and Dean are) Jewish, etc. 

It’s not surprising to me or anything that non-Jews don’t catch anything/everything Jewish about spn but that Jews catch both sides of it, because that’s just how being part of a marginalized group works. You learn about your own stuff AND the dominant culture’s stuff because that’s how you survive (socially, psychologically, literally). Members of the dominant culture don’t need to learn the marginalized one, are never confronted with it, and so they just.. don’t. I don’t even mean that in a normative or accusatory way, that’s just an observation on the state of things. Non-Jews who aren’t part of another marginalized religion, aka expressed xtians and cultural xtians, have a ton of misconceptions about Judaism, for example, “Jesus was Jewish” and not, “Jesus was an asshole of an apostate who made life harder for Jews at the time in a myriad of ways and whose movement has had a lasting negative impact on world Jewry (and other peoples) for the ensuing millenia”. I truly Don’t Have Time right now to get into the varied and intense history of antisemitism in all its forms but. the point I’m making here is that I’m not shocked I need to explain that life experience shapes your worldview?? So if you’re Jewish you’re always gonna be living life through that version of the world and it does impact you?? Same as anything else?? As unwell as they may be, spn writers aren’t exempt from that. Jewish people writing about xtianity are doing so thru a primarily Jewish understanding and vice versa. Jews can (and did!) write about xtian lore but in a Jewish way! Some core Jewish themes: wrestling with angels/G-d, questioning G-d, IF there’s a G-d they will have to beg MY forgiveness, the afterlife isn’t really a big thing so all that matters is your time on earth, make amends to others directly and thru your actions rather than seeking absolution with G-d, you are not obligated to complete the work nor may you abandon it, etc… So that’s the other reasoning why we say “spn is Jewish” based solely on it being written by Jews. Rather than Death of The Author, let’s look at what the author has imbued the story with, both intentionally and unintentionally. And re: Chuck and idolatry… I don’t even know where to start with the way you phrased this but. the Jewish Spn Writers of Note are apparently Kripke, Gamble, and Edlund. All of whom stopped writing for the show years before the Chuck Is God plot! 

Like yes it feels very stupid to be writing a thousand words on antisemitism and supernatural but like. this is a spn blog run by a Jew so. This whole thing is also just the same every time. This is very representative of typical casual antisemitism.

[palestinianliberator]

To be Palestinian is exhausting

You will not find a single Palestinian who hasn’t had to endure all of the following and more:

Constantly having to prove our existence

[This is going to be a tremendously long post, but I implore you to read through what you can]

Constantly having to educate everyone around us on our history and people while we continue to be slaughtered

Constantly having to combat Israeli propaganda and dehumanization campaigns against us

Constantly having to combat liberal propaganda from those who simply cannot understand the pain and damage they are doing

Constantly having to defend ourselves from the overwhelming forces that stand in our way, from the Israeli forces to the global institutions that help support it to the structures in the US that mean that any Palestinian who dares speak out risk both their lives and livelihood

Constantly in fear of whether or not you’ll end up on another “list” as a result of daring to speak out

Constantly having to do it all again as soon as we’re back on the news

Constantly having to answer for all other Palestinians in a way that nobody else is expected to

Constantly being seen as the “crazy one” when trying to share your narrative, having to defend against an endless barrage of accusations of antisemitism

Constantly being put into situations by bad-faith actors who attempt to engage in “debate” or “discussion” or “dialogue” with talking points that demean and duhamanize you, all while being expected to maintain a smile and cool composure while someone literally debates to your face your own existence or how “actually it’s YOUR people’s fault you’re being slaughtered! Israel isn’t the bad guy here!”

Constantly being forced to choose between engaging in bad-faith debates framed in a way to make you look like the unreasonable bad guy while the person implicitly defending your ethnic cleansing is made to look like the “rational good guy” or looking after your own mental health, knowing that even refusing these “invitations” is itself a mark against you and your people

Constantly being told that you’re too “biased”, too “close”, too “emotional” about the literal slaughter of your people to be seen as a valid source, while Israelis and complete outsiders are given all the space they want to speak for us endlessly

Constantly seeing people being actively mislead and wondering if you have the capacity to reach out to them and attempt to share your narrative with them, knowing that if you don’t, they’re going to go on to propagate the same lies justifying your ethnic cleansing

Constantly having to combat GENUINE censorship throughout the media, social media, and society itself. It’s a fact proven by former Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube employees that Palestinian voices have their reach censored in a way no one else does, which is why it’s so important to amplify and actively share Palestinian voices rather than just liking or indicating support

Constantly being told you don’t know your own history by people who’ve educated themselves on Youtube and Wikipedia despite having lived the reality yourself and dedicating your entire life to studying every single aspect of it

Constantly seeing those who have the courage to stand alongside you being shut down with accusations of antisemitism and seeing them lose their courage to stand by you out of fear of their own image and livelihood and having to rush to their defense as well

Constantly having to see photos of your people, sometimes even people you know, maimed, injured, murdered, or burned to ash by Israeli aggression but knowing you have a duty to share what’s happening and must stomach the images to show the world the true extent of the suffering we endure

Constantly having to worry not just for your own safety, but the safety of your family and loved ones who can be punished or targeted because of things you yourself say

Constantly wondering who you can actually trust, from new friends and acquaintances to professors to even other Palestinians because we’ve been so heavily infiltrated by Israeli intelligence looking to blackmail Palestinians using anything from their sexual orientation or even made up “evidence” meant to ruin their lives

Constantly having your heart sink every notification you get wondering if it’s news that a loved one has been killed

Constantly seeing the corpses of loved ones shared on social media and reliving the trauma all over again, yet again knowing that you WANT the world to see what’s happening

Constantly seeing the effects this has on your own family and feeling helpless to do anything

Constantly on alert for the FBI at your door as they often “visit” Palestinians who dare speak out, myself included on numerous occasions 

Constantly wondering if your advocacy for your people is going to result in the loss of your job, scholarship, license

Constantly being asked to “humanize” and “feel for” those who live their lives day in day out completely unfazed by your suffering despite living in a society that couldn’t even FUNCTION without our subjugation

Constantly being told “don’t blame regular Israelis, blame the government!!” as if the state itself wasn’t founded on our ethnic cleansing, as if it isn’t “normal Israelis” who make up the entirety of the Israeli Military and have actively brutalized you and your people

Seeing allies you fought for suddenly SILENT when it’s their time to speak up

Studying on a US campus where those SAME SOLDIERS WHO ENGAGED IN YOUR PERSECUTION AND ACTIVELY SERVED AS THE ENFORCERS OF YOUR OCCUPATION then re-enact the trauma against you and you’re meant to simply ignore the fact that THEY ARE THE SAME PEOPLE WHO MURDERED YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY, and not being allowed to even be ANGRY at that

Trying to navigate this half-life in the diaspora where it’s a struggle to connect with other Palestinians given the distance between us and yet not being able to connect with anyone around because, again, they simply can’t understand

Constantly being expected to simply give up your time to those who demand you answer them and debate your existence and narrative with them, who them take you blocking them for your own mental health as a “victory” to be lorded over you when you simply can’t take it anymore

Constantly having to EXPLAIN all of this because nobody but other Palestinians can truly understand just how pervasive, overwhelming, and incapacitating this unique form of exhaustion is

Constantly seeing your erasure and ethnic cleansing defended all over the media, all over social media, throughout your academic career, while those ENGAGED in your ethnic cleansing have the audacity to claim that the media is biased against THEM

Constantly on guard with everything you say and write, knowing that unlike those promoting our ethnic cleansing, we don’t have the luxury of making mistakes or getting lazy in our writing and advocacy. One mistaken source, mistaken information, being imperfect is enough to discredit your voice entirely

The crippling obligation you have to share the narrative of your people, knowing that so many people will view you as the spokesperson of your entire people, knowing how unfair it is, but also knowing that if you DON’T speak out, nobody will on your behalf, and even the most well-intentioned, involved allies can simply never understand how it all truly feels

Seeing the entire world stand by and do absolutely nothing while your people are slaughtered time and time again

Seeing your history misconstrued by people implicitly defending your ethnic cleansing and settler-colonialism

Knowing that our parents have been through this and more, seeing them have to go through this yet again while still being forced to go about their daily lives and given no time to mourn or recover

Not being able to even share our culture without being attacked for it

Knowing that so many of your friends and family won’t ever be able to return to their homeland while foreigners from around the globe are flown into Israel free because it’s their “birthright”

A “birthright” denied to even my own parents, born in Jerusalem yet unable to enter it

Having even self-proclaimed “allies” question Palestinian resistance, policing our tone, never /really/ understanding our pain and anger and how they themselves contribute to it

Screaming from the moment you can about what’s happening to us, desperately trying to get people to CARE, and having it often fall on deaf ears

Knowing that if you’re not the source of information for those genuinely seeking to learn, they may find themselves mislead by sources that claim to be fair and balanced while imprinting subtle lies about Palestine and Palestinians on those they engage with

Not even being able to find the energy and ability to respond to genuine messages of love and support, which are greatly appreciated, and feeling bad about it because you don’t want to seem like you’re not genuinely happy to hear it

Feeling a sense of overwhelming exhaustion in times like this while at the same time being unable to sleep

Seeing the effect all of this has had on your people, knowing your people have among the highest rates of depression on the planet and yet we’re all suffering together with no way to ease the pain

Being constantly exposed to the ways in which your people are erased and questioning if you have the energy or sanity left to deconstruct such aggression to help outsiders understand the severity of it all

Seeing allies suddenly call for “peace” when Palestinians are finally fed up enough to rise up and fight back against an overwhelming military force

I could go on, but in case you it’s not already clear, I’m tired and exhausted

Always wondering if any of this is even worth it when the world has ignored your slaughter and ethnic cleansing for nearly 8 decades, knowing that nobody is about to step in to help now.

Constantly wondering if any of this is even worth it, and then feeling inspired by fellow Palestinians, our resilience, the fact that despite ALL of this and more, we continue to fight.

Despite all of this, I would never even consider or entertain the thought of being born as anything other than Palestinian

[starlightervarda]

I think this fandom should address the erasure of characters’ cultures. What makes The Old Guard so important to many of us is representation, we all love that the main characters are from all over the world and yet in most of AUs Joe is turned into american. What’s wrong with Joe being from North Africa? That silly post abouth Christmas is just another example of erasing Nicky’s and Booker’s cultures.I don’t want to fandom police, but I swear sometimes I dont get this fandom.

Hi nonny <3

Oh, man. I feel this deeply. A few weeks back I complained about how people refused to learn or remember what Joe was, but had no trouble making the distinction between Nicky being Italian and Booker being French.

I have a lot to say about this so...

                                             INCOMING RANT

Media and even historically always erases the backgrounds of MENA people. It’s very exhausting, having someone use ‘Muslim’ like it’s an ethnicity, when you can very much be a Russian Muslim, Indian Muslim, Nigerian Muslim, etc. It’s not a synonym for ‘Middle Eastern’ like people insist it is.

You shouldn’t even assume all MENA people are Muslim, plenty are Christian and even Jewish, and many are irreligious/atheists.

Basically, every time I see ‘a Muslim scientist’ or ‘Muslim poet’ I get hives. Yes, thank you, where was he from? Andalus? Baghdad? Damascus? Tehran? Cairo? Fez? Baalbak? Hejaz? Where was he from, what ethnicity is he?? Do you care that little???

You don’t call Copernicus a Christian scientist or Dante a Christian poet, do you?

It’s worse when they make it a synonym for ‘Arab’.  Like, no, Ibn Battuta was Moroccan, Omar Khayyam and Avicenna were Persian, Salah ad-Din was Kurdish, etc., etc.I’m pretty sure if someone called Alexander Graham Bell or Oscar Wilde ‘English’ there’d be hell to pay.

Even the official Old Guard Wiki page calls Nicky ‘an Italian Crusader’ but Joe is a ‘Muslim warrior’. Interesting how Nicky isn’t a ‘Christian warrior’ and Nile isn’t a ‘Christian soldier’. Joe has his own very rich background, is from a part of the world that his been so important historically, and he is allowed to exist beyond the parameters of religion.

He doesn’t seem religious. What he clearly is is North African. Unmistakably so.

It plays a part in many of the worst discourses in this fandom where people act like Joe is indistinguishable from others from Muslim-majority countries like Iran or Pakistan. Yes, that’s racist. No excuses. I’ve gotten vicious messages from people who refuse to get that through their heads that the people they know are nothing like North Africans, culturally, historically, or even linguistically. If you don’t speak Arabic you interpret things much, much differently. If you’re not from a MENA country your experience does not apply in this discussion.

It bugs me the most because I’m used to being represented in fiction by people who are not remotely like me. They’re always characters played by mixed Americans, Sub-Saharan Africans, White people in spray tans, Turks, Latinos of various backgrounds, Indians or half-Indians. This perpetuates the idea that we’re interchangeable, that we have no lands or cultures.

As much as I love the Mummy movies, not a single Egyptian or even North African person was in those movies. Evie and Jonathan were meant to be half-Egyptian, and Ardeth Bey was played by an Israeli...which is a whole other can of worms.

Last I heard, Leonardo DiCaprio was going to play Rumi...a Persian poet. The only Persian thing he can play is a Shirazi cat.

...Want to hear a sad story? When I was a child, I was already aware of this. We were watching Night at the Museum and I was expecting the mummy to be A) White B) Black C) Indian. But out came Rami Malek! I got so excited, I couldn’t explain it at the time, but seeing his face made me so happy! I knew him by his features, skin tone and hair texture! I was sad that he disappeared until Mr. Robot became a big deal...only for people to keep calling him an Arab.

A fucking Ben Stiller kid’s movie could cast accurately, but all these epic movies and TV productions could not and still refuse to? Interesting!

That’s why I was so excited for the live-action Aladdin, Marwan Kenzari and Mena Massoud are both North African. That’s why i came running into the Old Guard fandom, because Joe is North African played by a North African! I’m sure many of the Italians came for the same reason, Luca is actually Italian, not some American called Pete.

But in general, it really wouldn’t kill them to remember that Joe is North African, both he and Nicky are Mediterranean, Nicky and Booker were raised Catholic, and Andy is probably Eastern European. Neither Andy or Booker are like Nicky and vice versa, nor are they anything like Merrick, who is the embodiment of British imperialism, stop trying to equate them. These distinctions matter.

As for Modern AUs, those are up to your story. It’s only a problem if you change their ethnicities.

I don’t mind them set in America, it makes it easier for many to justify the characters meeting in the same city. I’m writing a Modern AU where Nicky is second-generation Italian, Booker immigrated from France, and Joe was born in the US to an Egyptian/Tunisian couple, because it hand-waves explaining what they’re all doing in the same place Nile and Andy are.

TL;DR Representation matters!

[kanmom51]

About LBGT idols in the kpop industry, I just had a conversation with an online friend of mine which left me a bit bitter.

She’s been into kpop for more than a decade and introduced me to it last year. We’re both pansexuals and so we were talking about the situation for lgbt people in Korea and in the kpop industry. I just slipped that I think 2 members of BTS might be in a relationship. Suddenly her attitude shifted, she was like yeah no don’t think so, it’s probably just over the top fanservice, companies are pushing members to promote ships don’t get fooled bla-bla-bla. I didn’t start an argument because she’s not into BTS, don’t watch their content so what’s the point but it kinda annoyed me. She knows me, she knows my POV about shipping, I’ve always been distant with it (we met trough an another online fandom where shipping is a big thing as well). It’s like the large amount of homoerotism performed in kpop kinda desensitized her, and now she thinks it’s all just business, companies using straight boys and and forcing them engaging into intense skinship to titillate the fans and bring more $$$. Which is a reality of the industry actually, it has been said many times, but then what? There’s no lgbt couples within kpop, it never happens? I don’t really where I’m going with this message but i find it intriguing that a friend, lgbt advocate, pansexual herself, has seen so much homoerotism performed between idols even since she’s been into kpop that it led her to the conclusion that all of this isn’t serious, it’s just a cash machine and idols just go with it cause in the end they have no choice. Total erasure of the lgbt idols in the industry, using same-sex attraction as just a scam. To the point that even some lgbt fans fall into that « there’s almost no lgbt idols and they never date eo you’re delusional » mentality... Much to think about. (Sorry for any English mistakes!)

It's ok anon, I'm annoyed too.

It's a bit hard for me to take someone seriously when they base their conclusions on a dazed generalized conclusion of K-pop, and no actual knowledge about BTS. I'm sorry, but it really annoys me when people make these generalized assumptions, and are so vocal about them, without even making the effort to learn about the subject, watch content, read a bit about them, as if all K-pop bands are made of one mould, not individual people from different companies (that within itself makes so much of a difference between the bands).

There is no doubt that K-pop culture desensitizes us. The combination of skinship within SK culture, something that is not common in many other cultures plus the abundance of 'fanservice' used to bring in the $$$ can do that.

Yes, there is some truth in what your friend says.

Yes, it happens in the K-pop industry.

Yes, in the early years BTS members were also forced to do questionable things for the sake of 'fanservice'.

But, you see, this is where it ends.

First of all, long gone are the days BTS take part in questionable fanservice. It's not that they don't engage in fanservice, they most certainly do, but, at least the way I see it, when they do, it's them being themselves on steroids, engaging with each other, doing the thing they love with someone they really enjoy doing it with. Is some of this interaction orchestrated? I think it is. But a lot of it is also spontaneous, undirected interactions between members of a band that are truly extremely fond of each other.

The interactions between JK & JM on stage create a buzz with the fans, and they know it, but they enjoy the interaction itself too. So is it fanservice? Yes it is. Is it purely fanservice? I think it's a mixture. Not every interaction on stage is for the fans, while some of it is purely for the fans, and some is mixed.

RB. One of the biggest loudest moments ever. Was it fanservice? Well, it was done, knowingly, in front the cameras and 10's of thousands of fans. And yet, I don't believe it was fanservice in the pure meaning. JK knew he was on camera. He knew he was being watched by 10's of thousands of fans. It was done for us to see, but not for us. JK surprised JM with his actions. He made JM cry with his actions. If it was fanservice why did JK's actions bring JM to tears? Would JM have cried if this moment was emotionally charged?

My answer to that is an outstanding NO!!

So yes, it was done in front of the fans, for the fans to see, but it was to send a message both to the fans and mainly to JM. JM understood the message, did we?

You and I know that if your friend would delve into BTS content over the years with eyes and heart open they would be able to notice a pattern when it comes to JK&JM, beyond the 'fanservice' moments. Those are the moments that made me believe, those small things you read in between the lines.

All that was one aspect of things.

But there is another your friend is totally ignoring, and that is that the abundance of fanservice is the perfect smoke screen for LGBTQ+ couplings within the world of K-pop to allow themselves to be themselves. Or what we have been calling 'hiding in plain sight'.

"Total erasure of the lgbt idols in the industry, using same-sex attraction as just a scam. To the point that even some lgbt fans fall into that « there’s almost no lgbt idols and they never date eo you’re delusional » mentality... Much to think about."

Yes it is. But I find it curious and also extremely sad that someone that is part of the LGBTQ+ community would come to such generalized conclusions, knowing so much about the struggle, and erasing any possibility that within that community of musicians and artists there are people that are part of the LGBTQ+ community.

[samwisethewitch]

Reconnecting with the Divine Feminine

I don’t think it’s groundbreaking or controversial at this point to say that all three Abrahamic religions are mostly patriarchal. Sure, we can talk about the veneration of the Virgin Mary, or the woman prophets in the Tanakh, or women saints in Islam. At the end of the day, though, we cannot overlook the fact that in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, God is a man. Since 31% of the world’s population identify as Christian and 23% identify as Muslim, that means over half of the people on Earth are completely disconnected from the feminine side of divinity.

Ironically Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are among very few religions that don’t embrace a feminine aspect of divinity. Patriarchal religion is treated like the norm in most modern cultures (again, largely because of the dominance of Christianity and Islam), but it has definitely not been the norm throughout human history. The Goddess, the Divine Feminine, has been a prominent part of human spirituality since before recorded history.

In ancient Sumer she was Inanna, the Queen of Heaven. In Egypt she was Isis, Lady of the Sky, Great of Magic, and Hathor, Lady of the West, and Sekhmet, Mistress of Fear. In Hinduism she is Shakti, the feminine principle that moves the universe. In Japan she is Amaterasu, the Great Illuminating Deity, and Izanami, the creatrix who rules the underworld. The Divine Feminine has taken all of these forms at different times and places, among many, many others.

Even the Abrahamic religions haven’t always been solely focused on masculine divinity. There is significant evidence that the Abrahamic God was originally part of a larger pantheon before becoming the sole object of worship in Israel and Judah. As part of a polytheist system, he had a consort, a goddess named Asherah. Rabbinic literature refers to the divine presence of the Jewish God as “shekinah” — interestingly, this is a feminine word, implying that this aspect of God is feminine.

The removal of feminine divinity from Christianity largely occurred during the fourth century, when Roman Christianity beat out other traditions as the sole “correct” Church. Before this some Christian groups, notably those in North Africa, had worshiped God as both Father and Mother — a masculine/feminine dyad, rather than the masculine trinity worshiped in Rome. Other groups identified the Holy Spirit as feminine, creating a trinity of Father, Mother, and Son. (Interestingly, these family triads were also common in Egyptian paganism.) When the Nicene Creed was created in 325 to standardize Christian belief and practice, it excluded these interpretations by affirming belief only in “God, the Father Almighty” and “Jesus Christ, the Son of God” and removing all mentions of God the Mother.

All of this does not invalidate the genuine, life-changing spiritual experiences people have had with modern Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. It does, however, prove that patriarchal religion is the exception, not the rule.

Modern paganism’s acceptance and veneration of the Divine Feminine is a large part of its appeal for many converts, especially women, genderfluid, and nonbinary people who do not see themselves represented in the mythology and art of patriarchal religion. The Divine Feminine is present in all pagan religions, though She takes different forms in different faiths.

In monist pagan paths like Wicca, the polarity of Goddess and God is seen as one of the primary ways deity makes itself known to mankind. In the words of Scott Cunningham, one of Wicca’s most influential authors, “The Goddess and God are equal; neither is higher or more deserving of respect… The Goddess is the universal mother. She is the source of fertility, endless wisdom, and loving caresses… She is at once the unploughed field, the full harvest, and the dormant, frost-covered earth.”

The Goddess and the God balance and compliment each other, and this balance is at the core of many neopagan religions. (There are some traditions that exclusively worship the Goddess, but we’ll talk more about that in a future post.)

In polytheist paganism, the Divine Feminine is present in the form of various goddesses who rule over different aspects of life and nature. It is not uncommon for polytheist pagans (or monist pagans, for that matter) to work with multiple goddesses, even goddesses from different historical pantheons. Some goddesses are explicitly associated with certain aspects of womanhood — for example, the Greek goddess Artemis is associated with virgins and young girls, while Demeter is associated with motherhood.

In many (but not all) polytheist systems, there is an emphasis on balance between gods and goddesses. One of my favorite examples of this is the marriage of the Morrigan and the Dagda in Irish mythology. The Morrigan, goddess of war, magic, and death, is married to the “good god” of life, fertility, and knowledge. Their union represents a balance between opposite, complimentary forces.

This brings us to another point I want to make, while we’re on the subject of the Divine Feminine: not all feminine divinities are passive, maternal, fertility goddesses.

In Western culture, women (and, by extension, feminine deities) are seen as the passive or receptive sex. This is largely a product of Victorian England, not an ancient truth.

Without knowledge of sex chromosomes, hormones, or the complexities of gender, Victorian thinkers developed a theory that men had a “katabolic” nature that was constantly releasing energy, while women had an “anabolic” nature that was constantly receiving and storing up energy. This concept of gender greatly influenced Western occultism and can be seen, for example, in Gerald Gardener’s conception of the Goddess as the passive recipient of the God’s energy.

This is a relatively new and very Western idea. In Hinduism, for example, Shakti is both the feminine principle and the energy that moves the cosmos. In the words of author Kavitha Chinnaiyan, “there is nothing in creation that isn’t a manifestation of Shakti.” Shiva, the masculine principle, is unchanging awareness — it is Shakti who possesses the dynamic energy necessary for creation.

I am by no means encouraging pagans to appropriate Hindu concepts. My point here is that no gender is entirely active or entirely passive, which is why so many cultures interpret gender in so many different ways.

Even within systems like traditional Wicca, which operate within a strict gender binary, neither gender can be completely tied down. In their book A Witches’ Bible, traditional Wiccans Janet and Stewart Farrar acknowledge that the “masculine = active, feminine = passive” model is an oversimplification. They use the example of an artist and muse. The (feminine) muse “fertilizes” the (masculine) artist, who “gives birth” to the resulting art.

Personally, I see the masculine/feminine polarity as a constantly shifting dynamic, with both sides giving and receiving energy all the time. Which side of the polarity is more active or passive depends on the situation.

Being pagan does not mean dedicating yourself to the worship of gender binaries, and it does not mean you need to uphold those binaries. God and Goddess are only two of many possible expressions of the Divine, just like man and woman are only two of many possible gender expressions.

Monist pagans see the God and Goddess as two halves of a greater, all-gendered whole. Polytheist pagans may worship gods and goddesses who fall outside of the gender binary such as the Norse Loki or the Egyptian Atum. In either case, divinity is seen as encompassing all possible gender expressions, not just cis man and cis woman.

The erasure of the feminine from Western religion and mythology means that the nonbinary nature of some deities is often downplayed or erased completely. (You’d be hard pressed to find a mythology book that doesn’t use he/him pronouns for both Loki and Atum.) Reconnecting with the Divine Feminine opens the door for other divine expressions of gender.

The end result of this acceptance of feminine and nonbinary divinity is a religious community built on equality between all gender expressions. No one is closer to the gods because of the anatomy they were born with or the gender they present as.

This paves the way for a religion where no one’s worship is restricted because of their gender expression. It allows for priests, priestesses, and priestixes. It allows everyone to fully participate in the rites of their faith, on equal footing regardless of gender or pronouns. It also creates an environment where practitioners feel comfortable exploring issues of gender and sexuality, knowing that they will not lose the support of their community if their identity changes.

Resources:

The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner by Scott Cunningham

The Morrigan and The Dagda by Morgan Daimler

“Victorian Theories of Sex and Sexuality” by Elizabeth Lee, Brown University

Shakti Rising by Kavitha M. Chinnaiyan, M.D.

A Witches’ Bible by Janet and Stewart Farrar

Casting a Queer Circle: Non-binary Witchcraft by Thista Minai

[incarnateirony]

An anti dressed up as a shipper, an idiot, and a terf all walk into the same bar.

It’s the same picture person.

A lesson.

Warning: if the title doesn’t give it away, queerphobic content comes up in this from the other party being documented.

So, some of you may have watched a twitter exercise yesterday.

It started simple: concern trolling white knight “for the writers” comes in to angrily declare fans doing something tagged in support of them about Destiel was “out of line.” She claimed things like “Misha was gaslit into supporting Destiel”, and pulled all kinds of stunts.

She immediately got on a soap box yelling “I HAVE A LIT CRIT DEGREE, I KNOW AUTHOR INTENT” of course implying she knew better than EVERYONE around her how to read text. She then pulled, of all things, @chill-legilimens​​ ‘ article about the network gods gutting the show out of the internet, and somehow misread it SO FUCKING BADLY -- SO FUCKING BADLY -- she thought it aligned with HER. She argued that fans influenced the writers, essentially, and basically pulled the exact opposite of the very clearly delivered message there out. When it was pointed out we know this author and even sometimes help edit their pieces, and she was, flat out misreading it while bragging about how good she is at deciphering text, it turned into a SHITSHOW.

I had watched her give a large group of queer people 2 days of runaround, while they tried to be polite, and similarly tried to prove everything while she proved nothing. Just preached. After 2 days of them exhausting themselves on her, I came in doing my blunt & savage thing, because fuck civility culture when it’s used by oppressors. Of course, she immediately started tone policing, while herself being an arrogant shitbrick the whole way.

She continued to preach author intent and talk down about “headcanons.” You see, she knew the authors very well. Berens’ name was mentioned in passing, and she came back with. “Who’s Berens? Is that the author of the article?” after Deirdre’s name had been directly cited in associated with it about 15 times.

(credit: @judgehangman​ )

But it gets better. She started pulling the “authors have said Dean is straight.” line. Now, at this point, we had already sourced her at least four pieces of information (quite formally too: SPN Official DVD Collection Season 8 episode 13 creative commentary, Edlund and Sgriccia; Dissent Magazine The Attack Queers Bob Berens review; the books in the office with screenshots, and more.) So we issued one simple request: Okay. Source.

For the next-- I shit you not-- 10 hours she bricked the thread to death, finding any and EVERY rabbit hole she could try to venture down. For the first hour or two a few of us tried to actually debate her newly raised points, but still gave reminder that we were waiting for her source. Every tweet was an opportunity for her to drop a 15 tweet thread trying to derail onto a new topic, and often clarifying she had no idea about any of it (Edlund, Sgriccia, Berens, Dabb--who she couldn’t spell the name of--and Deirdre all became an amorpheous blob in her retelling that she swore she looked at sources and wasn’t convinced, while she crossed all the data and comments about the sources). She tried to challenge that anyone could know all the writers and episodes just because she proved she couldn’t, even when multiple people expressed it to her extremely rapidly with not just author and director listings, but cross references on when they overlapped and major elements (like the 15.20 shot 19 tree being the Kim Manners memorial tree). She randomly babbled about Kripke once. Lied her way through and claimed those sources were vague. Etc.

But at some point, I decided, we’re not playing this distraction game. You wanted a debate, you claim you have a lit crit degree, and thus know the entire art is Argumentation. A source, if you’re declaring knowing author intent. One source. Any time she dropped a distraction tweet, I replied to her thread with things like a list of our sources vs her lack of any and a reminder. I installed a counter ticker. How many times had she been asked to either recant her point or give a single source?

Someone made a list of the logical fallacies she used in the argument. It was two tweets long and still missed several obvious ones. That didn’t stop her. Neither did the dozens of requests for a source or a recant. Onwards, she marched, derailing time and again. She brought in a buddy to try to distract, but he fell out real quick when he realized “the burden of proof lies on the arguer” shot him and her both in the feet in record time and he ducked out. 

Other greatest hits came out like “Dubs (Dabb’s) fanfic books”, and calling the ability to list authors and episodes “headcanons.”

Over time, the dialogue shifted: see, she came in trying the snide “enjoy your headcanons” downtalk, but as time and time again she was pulverized on every point about the show, or the authors, or anything else while STILL never even giving a single source to even her FIRST POINT and running distractions, it became a reality-- she was told, “We’ll enjoy our canon and author intent. You can enjoy your headcanon of... Dabb’s fanfic books and Lord Barons and the writers being collective hallucinations and whatever else in your hot takes about the show content itself” and she FLIPPED SHIT. 

As the ticker for sources approached 100, she started becoming flustered. Before that, even, she started repetitively misgendering Ezra (no tumblr to link in), and Ezra screenshot their bio of they/them and asked them to adjust. Ignored. Ezra linked this request and asked it to be addressed again, and again, and again. 13 times. Ezra linked it 13 times. She even replied to several of them. No avail. No change. Not until literally any and every tweet in her vicinity either had “source?” or “address gender?” for her to reply to did she flee there, and write some giant write-around of “oh, I didn’t see this, sorry” but still refused to actually use it. Or “I’ll use the right one now.” No, just completely strickened pronouns from her vocabulary with Ezra moving forward, after not one mistake, not two, not five, but 13 answers.

At this point, I notice a trend: throughout the entire conversation, she had flip flopped on my pronouns, clearly confused as to what to call me. As I generally don’t care (honestly I prefer he but meh), it didn’t ping me as something to react to while she switched religiously between “he” and “she”. But I realized now, despite all of that confusion: she never once thought to use “they.” Also earlier we found tweets of hers that, while now declaring herself bisexual, she used troublesome wording in the past to blur the line on if she was an ally or, as she phrased it “maybe less than 100% straight in the bell curve” in other conversations.

I mutter about this on the side to Ezra and some friends, but continue on towards the 100 ticker that was the goal to show people in this digital terrarium how disingenuous most people you argue with are -- an exhibit for the class. They know they’re lying and have been caught, but will not cede to admit “oops, I guess I was wrong.” but rather stick, unironically, to their own headcanons about things. After all, they vaguely sorta apologized even if suddenly just refusing to use any pronouns at all on Ezra after that. And she’s so quick to disappear into 15 tweet bombs of distraction trying to play victim for being held accountable at this point, we just didn’t jump to a conclusion on that, alarming as it is.

So. You know. Source.

At this point, she RANDOMLY starts evoking the fact that like, How Dare, She Watched Gay Men Die To AIDS, She Is A Great Philanthropist How Dare How Dare. 

I’m sorry, did you just evoke the blood of our dead to run away from the most basic scrap of accountability in what is literally the first wave of a lit debate because for the last 10 hours you have refused to take the necessary steps to move on to the next point? Did you... just... evoke the ghosts of gay men that were genocided to, essentially, pull up a smokescreen and run away from being party to queer erasure? Or even just? Giving a source? or admitting you were wrong on one point in a debate? Wow, you really just did that. 

Naturally, people involved got pissed. Her Sources ticker hit 100, but at this point, all that haunted her was how completely fucking vile and inappropriate that was in this discussion. 

She got blocked. She then tried to glom onto anyone that hadn’t blocked or muted her and run the same argumentation points she had earlier been decimated in the argument with, while yelling “I ship Destiel too! I wanted them to have sex too! Why does this make me the bad guy?” around the block and hoping nobody actually read the thread. She tried to pitch the “headcanons” point of view again, hoping a new audience would lick her boots. She was, largely, ignored; given a few more comments about her leaving the conversation losing all points and only covered in the blood of our dead she was so proud of; blocked by a few more. (unsurprisingly, if you check her actual tweet history, she seems more invested in Megstiel but)

This is when CommaSameleon -- a professor with two lit degrees and a primary focus in teaching the art of Argumentation -- literally -- stepped in. She initially tried to engage the fact that, well, this woman not only can’t argue out of a paper sack but wasn’t even arguing, she was just running in circles and distracting from all the points and hadn’t addressed a single lit point directly while preaching down at people. But Sam, also, noticed something. This woman kept changing things like “queerphobia” to “homophobia.” Sam mentioned this kinda puts off TERF vibes (I think Sam picked up on the gendering thing herself too.)

Her response? Which she deleted since? But Discord’s embed helpfully saved?

Her inacted non-apologies remain weak, especially in any form of debate be it lit or now queer topics.

Oh I’m sorry, let’s recap her viewpoints: TERF is a slur. “They” is made up and should be avoided at all costs. The blood of dead gay men are a token to use in a lit debate you’re avoiding responsibility in. After this, “authors are headcanons” is suddenly not your worst take, but fascinating that you 13 times didn’t even read the blatant ass screenshot. And I mean, these weren’t subtle or easy to miss these 13 times.

100. She had 100 chances, literally, on a timer, to give a source or shut up with her platforming until she had one. Instead, she chose every rabbit hole she could manifest to disappear into, only to be met by another request for a source, and not moving on until we address the first points. We’ve given ours, now you give yours. Instead, you choose this. This is the hill you choose to die on, rather than admitting, “Sorry, I guess I was wrong” or “I guess I heard that somewhere, my bad.” 100 chances. 13 direct QT requests to address gender which she replied to but didn’t reply to until cornered (and still didn’t, truly, reply to), and “TERF is a slur.” Oh, and after waving around the dead men’s blood she also suddenly Can’t Be A Terf Because She Adopted Two Trans Kids. Lord help those children. Or, you know, the more realistic thing is she’s just manifesting all kinds of bullshit at this point to save face, which is probably why she deleted all the related tweets that show she’s a giant-ass TERF.

So anyway, this is very much a lesson on:

Paying attention to how people manipulate conversation to erase genuine discussion and debate.

Paying attention to WHY they do it. Motivation on methods and tactics will clear up a lot.

Figuring out HOW they try to sound woke about shit and when it’s entirely fucking vile and inappropriate to pull

And by all above points, figuring out that these people are among us, and how NOT to let them influence your conversations.

I don’t care if it’s about a discussion on a ship or show or anything else. People do this. A lot. Extremely dedicatedly, if the 100 asks doesn’t make that clear. 

Stop letting people railroad your conversations with disingenuous bullshit.

So anyway in honor of this I made everyone a gif

Use at will. It’s tagged anti-terf if you want to use the search feature on it.

UPDATE: 

Just went and checked. She went and deleted literally her entire side of the conversation, hundreds if not thousands of tweets. Luckily, Ezra mentioned repeatedly -- and I do trust them inherently -- that they were saving the entire conversation, so that zip file exists somewhere. How fascinating, after she accused us that we would want to delete tweets. Someone realized they had a bad look and giant failure all around.

Also, a related anon that links to an earlier part of this conversation I didn’t even document where she was crying about “cis erasure” [x] This shit went on so long I legit forgot about that.

[gxrlcinema]

what do you mean "controversial opinions" all of my opinions are right and are the only ones that matter

(jk)

i don't think this is controversial but i don't understand all the hate that wanda maximoff (as a character) is getting recently. it's like people don't understand how people can enjoy flawed characters who have made terrible mistakes? of course she's not a ✨girl queen pussy boss ✨, no one's saying she is, but she's a powerful character who is morally grey and walks the line between good and evil constantly and that's what makes her interesting

a couple of thoughts on this:

one, there are some valid critiques of mcu wanda, namely, the erasure of her romani heritage and culture.

two, i think some people are really uncomfortable with wanda’s moral ambiguity. some of this has to do with expectations of the mcu heroes and some of it has to do with misogyny. watching a woman, particularly a mother, straddle the line of good and evil so much is unsettling, because it’s not something we’re used to seeing.

three, i also think there’s a discomfort with just how powerful wanda is (misogyny again). and i don’t mean that in an in universe power sense (although there’s something to be said for that) but in the way wanda has become one of the most beloved characters in the mcu. when the franchise started it was a total boy’s club, and now here we are a decade later and the appeal of a male character’s film is largely dictated by the audience’s attachment to a female character. wanda stans are a threat to who has the power in the fandom.

four, wanda stans are annoying sometimes, which i don’t think helps.

i agree wholeheartedly with you.

[pearwaldorf]

If I never see another post from Franzeska aka olderthannetfic here it will be too soon. How dare she answer questions about racism and AO3 like she wasn’t one of the people who helped build it into the very structure of the site? I am quoting this directly from her post (emphasis mine): 

We picked the archive warnings from things that were common on older fic archives. Which, yes, reflects what fandom cared about at the time and is not neutral. (And when I say “we”, I do mean me specifically. I can’t remember how much my committee chose those and how much the Board and others drove the exact selection, but I did a lot of the research into older archives at the time. Including something about racism straight up never occurred to me in 2008.)

And sure, our views can evolve a lot in a decade. But Racefail happened in 2009, and none of the topics discussed at the time are different than those we’re focusing on today, 11 years later. For shits and giggles, here is my archived Livejournal post about the entire mess. If you click through to the other links (synedochic’s in particular), I think you will see this is something that didn’t just pop up with Tumblr and the SJW/anti contingent. (I’m not comfortable with conflating antis/fandom fundies/purity wankers with fans legitimately criticizing racism in fandom, but that is how a lot of it gets lumped together as a dismissive tactic.)

Which brings us to That Piece of Shit Meta in 2016. I am linking to the Fanlore entry for context, because the Actual Piece of Shit Meta is archive-locked (you can access it from Fanlore if you really want to read it, but it’s 16K of garbage).

A selection of commentary about it:

Guys, this was the problem all along. I’m doing fandom wrong by falling in love with the wrong source text. If I’d only understood that this wasn’t my space to enjoy non-white and/or non-male characters, because the majority of characters are white men, imagine how much happier I’d be in my life. (allofthefeelings)

they’ve been spouting yt apologia while fetishizing asian culture for years, this is nothing new. i’m pretty sure i’ve read franzeska saying the same things back when racefail ‘09 was going down. like most of this isn’t surprising bc it is exactly what we saw yt lj fandom peeps spouting in 2007-2010 and i’m personally not shocked that these people learned absolutely nothing. they don’t want to learn and being accountable for their actions. (astro-projection [edited to correct quote attribution and link])

Franzeska goes deep into the history of AO3 to talk about why slash is represented heavily there... But in 16,000 words over 13 chapters, there is not one mention of Racefail ‘09. Not a single reference to the time a popular Harry Potter LJ community used a racial slur as a prompt in 2007. Nothing about the Supernatural RPF Big Bang story that used the 2010 Haiti earthquake as a backdrop for a J2 love story (THAT’S A REAL THING THAT HAPPENED). Nothing about the time in 2006 that comics BNF Te pointed out the marginalization black characters faced on two then-juggernauts of white m/m slash fandom, Angel and Smallville. (snarl-furillo, the entire comment is worth reading so please click through)

This erasure of context and history is violent. Because many of the women of color who originally (and still) critique/d and resist/ed fandom’s normalized racism/misogynoir did so to their own detriment and with not insignificant risk to their personal well-being, safety, and privacy. Women of color were ‘outed’ by other fans for speaking out (doxed). They were attacked and silenced from all sides. They lost friends and community. They had to, with great vulnerability, cut themselves open and drag out their own private, internal experiences to air for all the (white) people who disbelieved them. They often found themselves speaking directly to a fucking wall of over-sensitive whiteness that would just as easily topple right on top of them. If anything in fandom is precious, it’s white feelings. And it always has been. (halfhardtorock)

In 2017 she was part of a Kickstarter to do a film about fangirls and fandom. I asked (you’ll need to hit “show comment” to see it) her to publicly comment about That Piece of Shit Meta, which she did. 

But before she did, Chelsea Woods, the co-creator of the project, emailed me about the comment. I don’t remember what exactly the email said, because it was a really long time ago, but she wanted to talk to me about the meta, perhaps to help formulate a response. Chelsea also reached out to somebody else outspoken about the issue at the time, and this is from a DM exchange I had with them:  

I understand why Chelsea reached out, as the head of the project and probably because she thought I would be more likely to respond instead of Franzeska. But tbh it feels like Franzeska's trying to get somebody else (a woman of color) to do the legwork for her. To the best of my knowledge I don't have F blocked on Twitter or Tumblr, and it's not like my email is hard to figure out.  I don't exactly relish the thought of talking to her, but as the one who fucked up, I feel like it is incumbent upon her to make the gesture...

I basically told Chelsea the same as you, that at this point there is very little she can do to demonstrate she understood what she did was fucked up, and that she has learned anything from the experience.

And when I tried to reblog her response, I found out Franzeska had blocked me, if that gives you any indication of how much she honestly wants to engage in discussion. 

Which brings me to now. I was literally today years old when I learned that Franzeska was head of the Abuse team for A While. (Bess says 2008-2012.) So suddenly a lot of things make sense, especially the lackluster (to put it politely) response about racist nonsense I’ve heard over the years, like in male hockey RPF. [edit: additional context in this post, ty Rukmini]

Certainly Franzeska is not responsible for everything racist about AO3, but she has definitely had a hand in shaping a culture that sacrifices the well-being and comfort of black users (among others) on the altar of “maximum inclusivity of content”. To turn the phrase back on them, who is “our own”? Why is it important to preserve an environment where a racially fetishistic fic that objectifies a black hockey player can stay up but a black fan basically has to go in like Viago checking for sunlight?

There is a balance between draconian content restrictions and letting racism, sexism, transphobia, etc run rampant on the site. I’m not saying it will be possible to find it immediately, or that it won’t change over time. But we have to try, if the AO3 is truly committed to making it a place that includes everybody, and not just the specific group of people who designed the site.