writingindian

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[writingindian]

#nude #twospirit #TransLove #artwork #artist #transformation #empoweringmyself (at Vancouver Island, Canada)

[writingindian]

#nude #twospirit #TransLove #artwork #artist #transformation #empoweringmyself (at Vancouver Island, Canada)

[writingindian]

[writingindian]

Watch it, share it, expose it(Coast Salish Pride)

[writingindian]

[writingindian]

Mentally exhausted

Do you ever just sit in your and feel so weighted down by dysphoria and society that exiting the car is a task I have little spoons for at the moment and no one is with me that can buy the gas for me I have the twenty dollar bill but I don’t have the energy and I hate that about me and my mental illness and my fear to attempt Trans while living in a cis dominated society that would rather gawk or worse in my direction I’m Indigenous and Native to this island I live yet I’m afraid to my exit my car right now despite the harsh facts that I need gas to leave this place

[writingindian]

For Trans/Queer/2Spirit Youth of Colour: Sixth and Eighth Puberty

This is in relation to a course I’m taking at the university of Victoria. I’m relentless to expose the harsh truth of cisgender people ignoring Trans and queer health and how this places LGBTQ+ youth at incredible risk that can and should be easily avoided by unlearning antagonist views of our beautiful identities...

Week Two: Puberty and Early Puberty while Trans

by Kevin Henry - Saturday, 20 January 2018, 11:10 AM

To be transgender and nearly exclude the overarching health needs of Trans youth, especially at the stages of puberty and early puberty, is fraught with challenges to changing the BC health care system. Trans youth are already dealing with immense amounts of changes and cisgender and transgender youth are all battling with the stresses of everyday life (homework, parents, peers, bullies, stigma, shame). As a transgender student, I know we have to fight to be seen in a world that does not want us to begin with. The mental health of trans youth should be taken into serious consideration within these articles we are reading. Suicidal ideation is incredibly high among transgender people. Often youth are left alone with a mountain of questions about their gender/sexual identity but within the classrooms or textbooks little is reached on how we can work to properly support trans youth going through puberty, going through changes, going through these challenges nearly alone. I also agreed with Dewey in part by being influenced through Darwinian theory to some extent, especially the theories that pointed to the “development result[ing] from the interaction of an active organism with the environment” (Dewey, 1916). My interactions with Indigenous youth and families over the years lead me to a window of witnessing myself growing up with restricted access to cultural and language-based activities. LGBTQ+ Indigenous youth, once ostracized from our own communities because of colonialism, are learning the minimum necessities just to survive and salvage their mental health needs. Placing restricted interactions within a natural environment, as Dewey talked about, leads Indigenous children, youth, adults, families, without active environments that are culturally sensitive to the realities of colonialism and is a world of inactive organisms around them. However, Coast Salish communities and their youth are witnessing the resurgence of language programs, and more immersion with culturally based activities, i.e., drumming, singing, dancing, ceremonies, and canoe journeys to name a few. However, with the influences of western medical practices, Indigenous LGBTQ+ peoples are further restricted to health care access and often have doctors unaware of our unique health care needs. Especially ones rooted to our ancestral knowledges of land, health, food, and communal practices. To the identities of how transgender people, pre-colonization, interacted with our communities in benefit of our overall health and cultural based needs. Without cultural immersions of these queer identities, LGBTQ+ youth are left exposed to hardships that can easily be avoided through a decolonial lens of gender identity; otherwise, youth in the LGBTQ+ communities are oppressed continually by “structural inequalities that reinforce traditional [more stereotypical based] gender roles” and in Canada educational platforms base knowledge of adolescent health entirely on “the reification of gender norms and the essentializing[SIC] of gender differences” (Downing, J. B., and Goldberg, A. E., 2010). In western society, we are held prisoner to western beauty standards and wayward gender roles, and what is taxing the mental health of youth is teaching youth how to be either a boy or girl, or either a man or woman, and not stray from these concepts of westernized socially constructed gender binary roles. Today, I recognize breaking these stereotypical norms is slowly being discussed as social determinants of health among queer and Trans youth. What society is not properly teaching youth and adults is to find “liberation from the combined aspects of class oppression and patriarchy”

References:

Downing, J. B., & Goldberg, A. E. (2010). Lesbian Mothers’ Constructions of the

Division of Paid and Unpaid Labor. Feminism & Psychology, 21(1), 100-120. doi:10.1177/0959353510375869

[writingindian]

Adele, shedding tears, unlearning unhealthy copping skills, Trans Femme

Content Warning, talks about abuse, colonialism, racism, addressing Trans antagonisms, all of our lives essentially carry such sadness ....but this also deals with pride, learning to heal, letting go of unhealthy copping mechanisms, knowing that yes to trust people is with time but those walls can come down now I feel because these walls covering me solves nothing as each brick I have put up honesty only keeps people from knowing me, it also acknowledge how much value and worth we all have.

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Perhaps for me, abuse came easy, it should oddly enough, because western textbooks have in the past and continue to do in the present is abuse Indigenous, Black, and people of colour, we’re painted as godless, savages, Natives are looked at as criminals on our own land, Blacks are denied the reality of racism and slavery, Muslim’s are dined religious beliefs, dictators are banning words and constricting how people access online sources to display these many levels of hideous violence, we’re fighting to have or wanting to see humanity desperately come back to us, though for the few it feels like humanity is but a distant dream though humanity is attainable, I believe that much, I must, my grandparents are believers, I have heard their laughter knowing they have survived nightmares, even through the mountains they literally climbed to protect culture, songs, burning culture in hopes to rebuild on its ashes, just that and are the dreamers of their ancestors, and for me it’s just a way for me to shed the nightmare of the toxic masculinity holding me back from my true potential to be Transgender, while being Hul’q’uim’num, because I am Indian first, I live in hopes my ancestors once I die will welcome me home in loving arms accepting that I am Two Spirit, I feel the more I admit this to not only myself but everyone in between is an act of pure resiliency in motion, because my identities are outlawed, frowned upon is the way I resist assimilation, which my ancestors demand I don’t let colonial white wayward ways of gender binary to merely hold me back from being a Native Trans femme hwulmw (human)

[writingindian]

Looking fly and cute tonight, on a holigaycation with @parttimepikachu and enjoying my time away from the city 🌃 (at Ucluelet, British Columbia)

[writingindian]

Things I find artsy in the third floor gender neutral washroom of the young building #waste (at Camosun College)

[writingindian]

Me as a person #peacocks #beaconhillpark (at Beacon Hill Park)

[writingindian]

I walk through a narrow minded cisgender world knowing some fierce femmes help breathe life into this #trashpanda #thatface #Transfemme #theythem #queer #queerbabe #queerasfuck #gayswag #ilookdamnfine #intersex #pride #speakyourtruths #plaid

[writingindian]

The things I think about #McDonalds #garbage #deliciousnuggets #trashpanda (at McDonald's Canada)

[writingindian]

A day in the life of a Trans femme #theythem #wecute #family #queerbabes #cuties #familylove #siblings #blackandwhite #rain #islandlife #yyj #tinroof #gayswag #ambiguousgender

[writingindian]

#prayers #smudge #blackandwhite I’m feel uneasy tonight, my room moans and whines and my soul screams sage be burnt :/

[writingindian]

It's funny the way of a house must be cleaned up as you go yet to be invisible even though society commands you to dance to the white supremacist trance