#is genuinely liberating

[talaricula]

@agnost replied to your post “Also yes I did tell my wife they should watch...”:

hwhfjfjjfkfkkfk when you love something you love it HARD

​asskfllghh no i am PERFECTLY NORMAL

[queerliblib]

NBC ARTICLE ABOUT QUEER LIBERATION LIBRARY?!?!?!

it’s more likely than you think!!!

[stil-lindigo]

Heroes like Mirna El Halbawi are still working tirelessly to connect Gazans to the outside world. With an impending total telecom blackout looming, this has never been more crucial.

You can find a separate post on how exactly to buy e-sims here. Remember to buy from Nomad, Airalo and Mogo. The region to select for each of these providers are:

1. Nomad: Middle East Region

2. Airalo: Middle East

3.Mogo: Israel

Make sure to read their instagram post clarifying some common questions before you send them over!

I truly cannot impress upon you how imperative this is right now. Gazans are pleading for us to hear their voices while they are being massacred and the IDF has responded by limiting any access to fuel sources in an attempt to fully cut them off from the world.

If you want to do something meaningfully helpful in the middle of this crisis, this is how.

[ahaura]

something something when the facade of western "democracy" continues to crumble, liberals are faced with the choice of either abandoning the systems that facilitate genocide, theft, exploitation, racism, etc. or resort to old habits that do nothing to seriously challenge or dismantle said systems... inevitably many will fall back on focusing on optics/aesthetics and hyper-individualizing their approach to combat their feelings of helplessness etc. and/or to avoid confronting the systems in place that have led to this moment (which they are most comfortable in, because liberalism never truly changes the systems in place)

the problem is not, never has been, and never will be the *tone* or *conduct* of palestinians (in occupied palestine or the diaspora); the obstacles in the way of peace&liberation are not from palestinians or palestinian resistance but the continuation of colonialism, the maintenance of which is inherently violent and oppressive. the people responsible for the genocide going into its 4th month are not palestinians who liberals want to tone police but the u.s. empire and its glorified military base settler colony, whose existence is founded + depends upon the genocide and ethnic cleansing of palestinians.

[apollos-olives]

"go to palestine and see how they treat you" okay. i did. they treated me like normal. i'm palestinian and queer and they treated me just fine. but you know where i was treated like shit for being queer??? the u.s. of fucking a.

[lylahammar]

I’m so happy I’m fat 🥰 I love grabbing substantial handfuls of my tummy and feeling its comforting weight 💕 I love shaking my body around and feeling myself jiggle like pudding 💖 I feel really sexy when I wear bodycon outfits and fill them out, or let my fat rolls peek under my crop tops ❤️‍🔥 I love that my my body is a comfortable place for my girlfriend to lay, and that I can carefully squash the lights outta her when she wants pressure 💘 I love that my body fat keeps me warm when the power goes out during a winter storm and our house gets down to 32 degrees inside 💗 I’m so glad that I got over my teenage obsession with staying skinny and grew into a fat and happy adult 😊

[burningtheroots]

A common question and critique, both in feminist literature and in (online) feminist spaces, is ”Why aren’t the good men doing more for women? Why are they still so passive despite being the 'good' ones?”

Okay, so the answer is actually pretty simple.

At best, these self-proclaimed or so-called "good men" don’t care as long as it isn’t inconvenient for them personally.

At worst, they either secretly or openly enjoy women‘s oppression, humiliation, violation — both due to mere sadism and due to the fact that they actively benefit from it, personally as well as systemically.

That‘s why "good men" are nearly non-existent. Some might be allies when it comes to certain topics (though probably not for genuine women-oriented reasons, and yes, intention matters), however, they‘ll still be misogynistic and oppressive in other ways, or tolerate those who are.

And the concept of a "good men" who‘s "passive" is completely ridiculous. If you, as a member of the oppressor class who‘s advantaged by our systemic & worldwide oppression all the damn time, think that not doing anything makes you "good", you‘re merely a bystander, and hence a (silent) enabler. Not a "good man who‘s just being passive".

Silence is complicity.

They don’t deserve to be labelled as "good". Not harming us with their own hands is the barest minimum. And we deserve to raise our standards, and we also deserve that our sisters raise theirs.

Women for Women. That‘s it. That‘s the only way.

[homophyte]

its an episode about the many ways morty fears rick.

its about being afraid of rick and being afraid of his sadness and his callousness and his power. its about morty knowing the power rick has over him and being afraid of that. and knowing that ricks decisions are fickle and often Bad and that morty is going to be beholden to them. when rick jumps morty is forced to follow after and pay the same price for no crime. and the fear that for his loyalty and obedience there is no reward . Morty Is Afraid Of Being A Dog.

if rick is in a simulation where hes given everything he wants and hes too selfish and cowardly to leave when it threatens his life, morty will have to die with him.

if rick is in a simulation where he has the option of pretending nothing is wrong and everything is fine and hes too selfish and cowardly to admit its a lie even when it threatens his life, morty will have to die with him.

if rick is forced to admit he cares for morty or die he would die before saying it. and morty knows it. and Im Going Crazy

[hella1975]

it's been pointed out on here before that a lot of terf arguments are actually rooted in sexist idealology that feminists fought and died to unnormalise decades ago and that's its own kettle of fish but one thing i also find very frustrating about this so called 'radical' feminism is that it's so... defeatist? like the moment you categorically label an entire section of society as Bad and Inherently Evil then there's also the implication that nothing can be done about it, and it completely takes all accountability away. saying all men are evil is just another way of saying boys will be boys. he raped her because he's a man. he hit her because he's a man. he didn't listen because he's a man - it's almost offensively oversimplified. there's no point trying to fix this issue in society because men are just Like That, okay! so now what? it's not like they're going anywhere, so you just accept that 50% of the population are evil and will forever treat you terribly and there's nothing to be done about it bc they're biologically predisposed to it? like is that fr the argument here? you're soooo radical for that

[hadesoftheladies]

everytime people rush to defend a male (usually accused of abuse) for the character and humanity they projected on him i just marvel at how many grown ass adults genuinely don't consider the fact that men can lie

like men can lie

[bitchthefuck1]

Rewatching succession it really is wild to see Kendall and Shiv convince themselves over and over again that they can "fix ATN/Waystar from the inside" only to completely abandon their morals the minute it gives them a strategic advantage.

When they're on the outside it's an endless diatribe about how evil and rotten the company is to its core, but the second they get the slightest whiff of power they suddenly decide the problems are actually really manageable and that with the right leadership it could be a force for good, and like...the saddest part is that they genuinely seem to believe that.

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

truth in advertising laws covering online store search results would do sooo much damage to enshittification

like if i search "gluten free" it should be illegal for walmart for instance to include items that are not gluten free in the results of that search

if it's super important to have "associated terms" or w/e included that could be an option for customers to opt into i guess but this thing where you HAVE TO pick through 5000 irrelevant items to find the 3 that actually meet the search criteria should be illegal

also if you sort by price and it does not actually sort by price (as none of the big shopping websites do anymore seems like) that should be illegal too.

thank you for coming to my old man yells at cloud talk but also i'm right.

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

when has anyone EVER said that homophobia is izzy’s only motivation. i’m on team “gay homophobe izzy” and i do not think this is his only motivation. i don’t even think it’s his primary motivation. it is another layer of complexity on a fascinating character. he is gay and in unrequited love with ed. he craves power and leadership but he is not good at managing those things when he gets them. he thinks men should behave a certain way and is aggressive and cruel to the men who don’t meet his standards. men having sex with each other is fine, but men falling in love with men falls outside of his rigid idea of how men should behave. he lacks the emotional maturity to be able to identify his feelings towards ed. he is so repressed he only accepts intimacy in the form of physical violence. he blames stede for ed changing. he hates stede because ed is changing. to izzy, the worst part about stede changing ed is the fact that stede is such a pathetic excuse of a man it shatters izzy’s image of ed to think that ed could find anything about stede appealing. he’s dedicated his life to the version of ed that he’s made up in his head. he is possessive of being the only one to call him ed, to be the only one who gets to call the legendary blackbeard by his name. but izzy has never been able to see ed without blackbeard. to him, knowing ed is a privilege only because ed is who’s behind the legendary blackbeard’s curtain.

i think izzy is fascinating. he's a fantastic character. he is incredibly well written. he plays a crucial role in the narrative. this show would not be the same without him.

im telling you now, having spent my time in this fandom primarily interacting with people who also read izzy as homophobic, anyone who is using this interpretation to reduce izzy's complexity is by far in the minority with that take.

[tomwambsgans]

tomgreg is not "i could fix him" nor "i could make him worse" but "i could make him feel like a real person." from both ends.

[communistkenobi]

i know next to nothing about queer theory, but i did exist online during (what felt like) huge exclusionary periods (ace discourse, bi/pan discourse, and transmedicalism were the big ones i remember)

i wonder if the first drive for sexuality being something unchangeable and intrinsic to you had something to do with those things, that queerness was fixed and definable, which meant that there were strict lines to be drawn about who was and wasn't gay/lesbian/bi which was only made worse by trans and nonbinary people who didn't exactly fit the previous molds

ill be doubly honest and say i only interacted w/ the community online at the time bc living in a homophobic country doesnt give you a lot of opportunities to meet up in person which means my view of the whole thing is skewed. im not sure if this makes any sense

What I’m about to say isn’t a diagnosis of the causes behind those discourses (partly because i don’t think there is a single reason animating those arguments), but like I guess in general a very baseline authority people fall back on is biology. Dominant reactionary discourses describe being gay trans etc as a lifestyle choice, as an active decision to participate in sexual and gendered degeneracy, and so a very appealing counter-claim to make is to point to biology - we are born this way, we can’t help who we are just as cishet people cannot help who they are, so you should accept us because we can’t change our identity. That rhetorical strategy requires/assumes a stable sexual and gendered ontology, a primary authority of the body that can’t be altered. While I believe this argument is fundamentally flawed, I think this is a straightforwardly easy argument to make re: sexual orientation. With trans and non-binary people this is more difficult because the foundational claim to our existence is that gender is mutable, is alterable, is subject to change (and also “I’ve felt this way since I was a child” is a pathological model of gender dysphoria that is enforced through medical and psychiatric institutions, not a reflection of lived reality for many, many trans and non-binary people). That doesn’t necessarily mean being transgender is a “choice” (although if someone said they woke up one day and chose to be transgender then that is a perfectly authentic justification), especially because “choice” in these discussions is often framed as individualised, private, detached from the social world - we are all just free agents making rational autonomous decisions in a field of equally rational choices, etc. which I think is a very impoverished way to understand choice and agency. Gender is an institution, it is a set of behaviours and performances that we choose to engage in in many different ways, and my use of the word ‘choice’ there does not imply these choices are free from coercion, violence, or harm. I chose to transition, I chose to engage in performances and behaviours that signal to the social world that I am a man - where that desire to make those choices arises from is another matter, and honestly not one I’m super interested in figuring out. Like if I discovered the ‘origin’ of my transness it wouldn’t make any difference to me. Similarly, how I choose to signal masculinity is very obviously bound up in dominant gendered assumptions. Trans people get accused of upholding gendered norms a lot, but that’s only because we aren’t taken seriously unless we do so! It is a survival mechanism that allows us to better navigate incredible amounts of violence and social exclusion, and arguing that our desire to do gender with our bodies comes from some grade-school assumption that dress = woman and pants = man or whatever is pure projection on the part of cis people. cis men think if they drink pink wine they’ll become gay - trans people are not the ones enforcing these norms here.

Getting a bit far afield here, so to loop back around - I think a stable state of sexual and gendered subjectivity or “being” is very appealing to a lot of people because it’s a way to dismiss reactionary fears and to justify to yourself that your oppression is entirely out of your control (which is true obviously!). Again I think these arguments are flawed because they buy into cisgendered and heteronormative ideas about gender and sexuality, that it is a biological burden imposed on us, that deviance is not a choice, that gender is done to us as opposed to being gendered agents, that we are similarly trapped in a sexual prison and should be accepted on those grounds, etc, but they have massive rhetorical power.  

As I’ve said before I’m a pretty staunch believer in Butler’s assertion that it is social all the way down, that gender is not discoverable in the body but rather the body is the medium through which gender is done in the world. Cis people choose to do gender just as much as trans people do! The only difference is that institutional architecture is set up to facilitate and make invisible (in very misogynistic and racist ways) those gendered practices. I think the stronger counter argument to make is that cis- and het-normativities are deeply violent and miserable status quos that need to be dismantled and discarded, that true choice can only emerge vis a vis gender and sexuality once those institutions are abolished, and that choice is actually a desirable end-goal - I want people to be able to participate in gender and sexuality as free agents, as non-coercive practices that are sites of great joy and wonder and pleasure. And this world is only possible if we accept that there is no gendered or sexual ontology, that it is all smoke and mirrors, that this current system’s primary function is to reproduce the nuclear family, to maintain the hereditary nature of class and wealth and race, to provide a standardised system of labour division, to maintain a distinction between the public and private labour realms, and so on.

So again like, is this what animates discourses about who gets to be counted as lgbtq/queer/whichever label you want to use? I don’t know. Probably some of it has to do with that. Queerness is in party a pathological category that is used to describe a failure to meaningfully reproduce cishet norms and practices, it is a set of relationships you have to legal and political and medical and administrative institutions (which is especially true for trans/non binary people). I like this definition because built into it is the possibility of change - I do not want trans people to be assimilated into cishet society, I want society to become transgender, thereby making transgender an irrelevant medical and legal category of person. Much like communism aims to abolish class by universalising the proletariat, I want to abolish gender by universalising the legal and political and medical mechanisms of transition. Only then will cisgenderism be abolished.

One thing I have been thinking a lot about is something a friend said to me, which is that human rights to do not begin with a definition of human - in the same way, I think trans rights do not require a definition of transgenderism. Just universalise and de-pathologise the mechanisms through which transition is expressed. Make it easy to change your name, remove all barriers to hormones and surgery, make everyone economically secure enough that they can change their wardrobe however they please,  desegregate all gendered spaces, de-gender clothing, remove gender markers from all documents, and so on and so on. Doing so would make both cisgender and transgender an irrelevant legal and political category and, again, allow choice to emerge as a meaningful mechanism of gender expression. 

This isn’t a comprehensive policy platform, there are many things I’m sure I haven’t thought through and a large portion of this discussion has to contend with the colonial and white supremacist nature of the western binary gender (bringing us into discussions of decolonial efforts, socialist efforts, and so on), but this is already getting long and I feel like I’m rambling. But like fundamentally I believe in a radical political imaginary that argues that all of this is subject to change and therefore any arguments about an essential gendered or sexual being is, at the end of the day, a reactionary description of gender and sexuality 

[artist-issues]

I’m starting to hate that podcasts, movies, and books are being marketed specifically as arguments. Calls to arms. “If you think we ruffled some feathers last year, watch out! This year we’re really going to bury the [woke/liberal/conservative/bigoted/pearl-clutchers/misogynists/feminists] and roll on their graves! If you think casting a [insert the definition of a person by their outward appearance/native country/gender/orientation/religion] in this role was groundbreaking, wait till you see what we’ve got next! Get ready to see [insert hot-button words like “a strong female role model” or “what a real man looks like”]

Stop making “aggressive punk-rock idealogical powerhouse” your marketing identity. Just be genuine.

Stop saying “HERE’S WHAT WE HATE! HERE’S WHAT WE’RE AGAINST!” and just say what is true. When you actually believe something is true, and believe that truth stands on its own, and needs no help, then you can shine a spotlight on it genuinely, lovingly, without all the bluster and insecurity of false confidence and making “coolly mocking the other side” your whole persona.

Don’t say “here’s what THEY’RE doing that’s so wrong.” Say, “look how great this true thing is.” Anything else is a vanity project. You’re making your podcast/movie/book about how you’re the best voice for a specific audience, and you know how we can tell you’re not genuine? Because you don’t actually talk about what makes truth good. You talk about what makes liars disgusting, and then applaud yourself for being the one to say it. It’s all about you. It’s not about the actual values you align yourself with.