…the d slur discourse is taking an interesting turn.
lovecraftian discourse monsters under ice etc etc but do people just keep making new flags with different shades of pink whenever the previous maker turns out to be #problematic because that idea is so funny
Apparently this Pride month is all about flag discourse because that’s all Ive seen on Twitter (but what did I expect from that nightmare of a website?). The creator of the “old” flag, a literal lesbian, says the word dyke and now it’s suddenly a punishable crime. She also recently took down her online shop (which she heavily relied on to make money since she’s struggling) because lots of people have been giving her shit.
Yall realize that you don’t have to agree with every single thing someone says, right? You can be friends with people that have different opinions. There’s no need to block people over stupid shit like you being a truscum and them being a tucute and vice versa. We can hear each other out and respect our opinions and continue to coexist normally. Why do you want to limit yourself to people that think exactly like you all the time? You wanna live in an echo chamber?
Heterophobia and cisphobia exist. Just aren’t as oppressing as homophobia, transphobia, etc. but it doesn’t have to be oppressing to exist. It’s prejudice against straight or cis people. That simple.
People in the ace spectrum, you are not weird or faking if you have a high sex drive, if you masturbate a lot, if you watch porn a lot, if you read/write/create a lot or mostly nsfw content.
Asexual does not mean completely and utterly unsexual. Your relationship with your libido, masturbation, porn, nsfw, and anything else, sexual in nature or not, can be part of your asexuality regardless of where you fall on the ace spectrum
the queer community was formed by people who were deemed strange and abnormal in society based on them not conforming to expectations about sexuality & gender. there are no specific boundaries bc this isn’t a club. a cishet guy that likes wearing dresses who fights side by side with us for true liberation, is 100x more queer than a millionaire gay man who’s besties with companies that sell us watered down versions of our own culture for profit during pride while donating to homophobic lawmakers every other month.
i’m gonna say this again because it really pissed some people off: yes, I would rather have a cishet GNC man who stands with queer people, is involved in our spaces and our culture, stands up for us when we are attacked, and is active in furthering queer liberation, than a rich gay man who spits on the lower-class queers who gave him the ability to be out, who sells his soul to corporations who couldn’t give less of a shit about us, just for the wealth and power of capitalism. Fuck that guy. I’m not saying he isn’t gay - he is! Nothing can take that away! But we have the saying “not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you” for a reason. The family-friendly gay millionaire isn’t my brother. The poor crossdresser who has been a part of this community since it’s inception is. Fuck your bootlicking bullshit.
Can bisexuals please stop acting like bisexuality has always meant attraction to all genders.
Because when I joined the community that was not nor ever was a common definition of bisexual.
If you find that definition of bisexual works, then that’s fine.
But please stop acting like the term bisexual has always meant that.
As a bisexual I define my attraction as being attracted to two or more genders. That is still how I view my bisexuality. It is not wrong for me to view my bisexuality this way.
I also feel like this is an excuse for panphobes to justify their harassment of other pansexuals over the label they choose since pansexual can also mean attraction to all genders. And this in turn allows panphobic bisexuals to justify their idea of pansexuality not being a valid label.
I just want to remind people during pride month that even if you may fit the definition of a label it is ok not to want to identify with that label.
For example, if you fit the definition of someone who identifies as bisexual, you do not have to identify as bisexual. You can if you want to but you don’t have to. There are a ton other labels that are similar to bisexual that you can use like pansexual, polysexual, omnisexual, queer, etc. Or you can just not use a label at all.
I bring this up because it seems like we get so caught up in whether or not someone fits the label that they give themselves or if one should even use that label to begin with. We get into constant fights in the LGBT community over whether or not this person or that person is in the wrong somehow for choosing to use that label.
I want to remind everybody that how one chooses to identify and what labels they choose are not up for debate.
BAB’s (battle axe bisexuals) always claim that pansexuals have hurt bisexuals. Or that pansexuals have held back bisexual rights.
The problem is they can’t actually explain to me how pansexuals have ever hurt the bisexual community in any meaningful way. They assume that pansexuals are trying to somehow invalidate the identity of bisexuals.
This is just straight up wrong. As someone who identifies as bisexual I refuse to remain silent on pansexual erasure within the lgbt community. The amount of panphobia I see on tumblr needs to stop. This discourse gets us no where and we are literally just punching ourselves. Pansexuals are friends to bisexuals not enemies.
hey, i recommend you read some stuff battleaxe bi people say. im too tired to write a small essay lol but i do want you to know its not unwarranted.
i dont hate pan people, trust me. i hate the label and the attitude some pansexuals have. they believe theyre better than us. the existence of pansexuality is also biphobic and transphobic since it is often said to be “into men, women, and trans people”, sometimes people also say its when you do not care about ones gender. that has always been bisexuality.
its just that we are sick of being hurt by straight people, the lgbt community and by people with a sexuality that is the exact same us as. i reblogged something before and it was great at representing what pan people do to us. it was about people complaining that loki is bi instead of pan and using biphobic rhetoric.
Listen I’m sorry you’ve been hurt by the community but that doesn’t give you an excuse to exclude them. Also I know all the BaB arguments and I’m convinced by any of them. Also most pansexuals don’t think like that and I feel like you’re using a lot of straw man arguments against pansexuals here. I’m sorry but I’m just convinced
BAB’s (battle axe bisexuals) always claim that pansexuals have hurt bisexuals. Or that pansexuals have held back bisexual rights.
The problem is they can’t actually explain to me how pansexuals have ever hurt the bisexual community in any meaningful way. They assume that pansexuals are trying to somehow invalidate the identity of bisexuals.
This is just straight up wrong. As someone who identifies as bisexual I refuse to remain silent on pansexual erasure within the lgbt community. The amount of panphobia I see on tumblr needs to stop. This discourse gets us no where and we are literally just punching ourselves. Pansexuals are friends to bisexuals not enemies.
As someone who identifies as bisexual. I really hate seeing other bisexuals on tumblr deciding to collectively shit on pansexuals for no good reason.
And the thing I want to ask them is why? Pansexuals don not hurt the lgbt community whatsoever. To all my pansexual peeps out there I want you to know that I love you and will not judge you for choosing to identify as pansexual. Ultimately I do not care why chose your label. You have the right to identify as bisexual, pansexual, both, or neither.
I just don’t see a good argument for why the pansexual label is harmful. It’s just another to view attraction that involves being attracted to more than one gender. People who are quick to point out how the definition of pansexual is bad fail to realize that the definition of bisexual isn’t that great either. We shouldn’t look down upon and act like people who choose different labels are bad people who deserve to be mocked and talked down upon within the community.
Anyway BAB’s (battle-axe bisexuals) can go fuck themselves.
At this point I think that Bisexuals and Pansexuals have made an umbrella for their people that if you look one way it shows the bi flag and if you look the other way it’s the pan flag. Honestly there is so much overlap between the two identities that I am not sure that I could identifiably state something in particular is bi or pan as opposed to being “whatever identity makes you happy”
As someone who identifies as bisexual. I really hate seeing other bisexuals on tumblr deciding to collectively shit on pansexuals for no good reason.
And the thing I want to ask them is why? Pansexuals don not hurt the lgbt community whatsoever. To all my pansexual peeps out there I want you to know that I love you and will not judge you for choosing to identify as pansexual. Ultimately I do not care why chose your label. You have the right to identify as bisexual, pansexual, both, or neither.
I just don’t see a good argument for why the pansexual label is harmful. It’s just another to view attraction that involves being attracted to more than one gender. People who are quick to point out how the definition of pansexual is bad fail to realize that the definition of bisexual isn’t that great either. We shouldn’t look down upon and act like people who choose different labels are bad people who deserve to be mocked and talked down upon within the community.
Anyway BAB’s (battle-axe bisexuals) can go fuck themselves.
The amount of lgbtq+ discourse that we really wouldn’t care about irl that cishet people debate over is kinda a lot and I think we should talk about that???
“Everybody agrees we need to shame straight women for reading queer fanfiction, but–”
No. No, we literally do not need to do that. It helps no one, homophobes don’t care, people exploring their sexualities and genders will retreat back into the closet, queer people will be pressured to out themselves, there is no version of this that doesn’t do massive disproportionate splash damage to queer and questioning people, and moreover it hurts literally no one to let straight people read and/or fap to smutty queer fanfic in peace as long as they aren’t shits to actual queer people.
DPC and DPL. Dead People’s Clothes and Dead People’s Leather.
Their toys, their paintings of half naked, naked, screwing men. The statues. The leather. The sling. The posters. The … all of it.
We’d literally Straighten homes. Depending. Some families knew and were fine. Or more ok. But pictures of other guys on phones was the least of it.
I have… leather that’s been passed through three or four men who’ve died before getting to me. They’re the heirlooms now, passed down chosen families.
Sometimes there were crews. We’d show up as soon as possible, as a unit. We’d hit the bedrooms first. Clear out closets, under beds, bedsides. We’d donate, throw out, take mementos. Pass on. Secret lives and secret, us only treasures.
Then we’d leave. For some family’s you never talked about it. They never knew. It was better all around.
I have vests, gloves. A belt. Arm bands. Paintings. T-shirts. Photos, undeveloped film that’d I’m still somewhat terrified to try to get developed (lol). We live on in the living rooms of others.
This is. A very important message for the younger generations of queers.
We still have so much father to go, but y'all. Don’t let our past be forgotten.
50 years ago: Dr. John Fryer, in perhaps the most courageous and definitely the most consequential act of his life, sat down in a hotel conference room, looking like a clown in a rubber mask and curly wig. Every part of him was covered. He was terrified.
“I am a homosexual,” he said. “I am a psychiatrist.”
Dr. Fryer only spoke up because he knew that time, at that place, could have made a difference. He knew the American Psychiatric Association had a dusty little committee that oversaw the list of diagnoses and disorders the profession used, and the new committee chairman was fiercely committed to science. He was willing to overturn old Freudian dogmas if the empirical evidence said that homosexuals were not actually the disordered, perverted fiends psychiatry thought they were.
There is so much wrong with the world. It is natural to feel frenzied with the desire to set all of it right, everywhere. It is also natural to feel overwhelmed and powerless, because almost none of us possess the power to make changes on a scale equal to what’s wrong.
Two years before Dr. Fryer’s speech, gay and lesbian protestors picketed the APA’s general meeting. They stormed into conference panels, demanding that the APA take homosexuality off their list of mental disorders. It was a miserable failure. These midcentury Freudian psychiatrists naturally considered themselves as a cut above the unenlightened mass of common society; this ✨destructive and antisocial✨behaviour just proved that gays and lesbians had something wrong with them. Even members of the GayPA, the unofficial association of homosexual psychiatrists, disapproved of their behaviour.
So one of the activists, Barbara Gittings, realized they needed to switch tactics. If psychiatrists would only listen to another psychiatrist, they needed an inside man. So she campaigned relentlessly among the GayPA, asking psychiatrist after psychiatrist to put their reputations, careers, and medical licenses on the line to speak up for them. Doctor after doctor turned her down. No wonder; at the time, “sodomy”, meaning almost any non-PIV sex, was still a crime in 42 states. Who would put themselves out there like that?
Hence Dr. Fryer’s disguise. Hence his subsequent retreat from public gay activism. The following year, he lost another job for being too obviously gay. He dedicated the rest of his career to geriatric psychiatry, focusing on the spiritual and emotional needs of the dying and the bereaved they left in their wake. He threw large and fabulous parties, but always felt himself to be on the fringes of the LGBT movement. Only at the end of his life did people begin to realize just how profound his weird, secretive, clown-suited moment had been in their history. It doesn’t seem to have brought him much peace or healing, after a lifetime of silence and oppression.
We’re taught all these triumphant narratives where someone is the hero of a movement; when they are tirelessly committed to a goal and get to celebrate its accomplishment. When there is something wrong in the world, we’re given images of being pivotal to its solution. There’s almost an element of self-punishment; if we are not constantly anguished about something, if we do not constantly push beyond our own limits, are we really trying?
And consequently as a society we ignore or downplay the work that gets shit done. Not a heroic narrative, but someone stepping up once during a life where they have very little spare time or energy for activism. Not a complete change, but the small push of one tiny decision that looks like it might be important. Not halting a war halfway across the world, but showing up to the boring committee meeting you get invited to every year, and speaking for ten minutes.
And then years of friends, of renting rooms to med students to stay financially afloat, of providing what comfort and kindness you can to people you can’t really help at all. It is hard sometimes to understand how much it matters to be humane and decent to the world around you, but it’s easier to imagine when you think about the world around you being humane and decent to you.
I’m not saying we should stop watching the news or stop caring about events we cannot control. I am saying that we need to feed our own capacities to be loving and courageous and thoughtful—to survive, and do more than survive—and then we need to see what opportunities to change things are within our grasp, and what we would need to feel able to take part.
It’s possible the decisions we can actually influence will in the end be meaningless. But then again, it’s possible they won’tbe.
“people with uteruses” and “people with ovaries” and “people with testes” and “people with breasts” are completely harmless and useful phrases to use when discussing legislation & medicine I think yalll are just mad at the idea of trans & intersex people having medical & legal autonomy & the ability to describe our experiences without misgendering ourselves
reminder: trans people can be denied coverage on their insurance because the legal terms describing those treatments are gendered. a trans man with ovarian cancer can be refused access to treatment that a cis woman in the same position would be afforded because of a loophole created by the word choice.
they’re not just harmless and useful phrases, they’re potentially life saving.
Intersex folks too.
Think about pap smears, prostate exams, mammograms, and so much more: There’s a lot of super medically important stuff that people get denied because they don’t have the right gender on their paperwork.
Since joining Tumblr, I’ve met a lot of young queer people. Look, I’m a bisexual man in a gay relationship, and I’m approaching 30. I was still a kid when Matthew Shepard’s story was being covered on the news. I remember thinking, “I better keep my mouth shut about these feelings I’m having.”
And then I met Dominic when I was 12, and people could see how in love we were. And we got the shit beat out of us. The year I met him, some kids in the grade above me held me down against the bleachers in our gym and stomped on my hand until my fingers broke. Instead of sending me to the nurse, the teacher sent me to the assistant principal to explain the situation. She asked why the kids had beat me up. I said, “They were calling me gay.”
Her response was, “Well, areyou?”
My, “I don’t know,” earned a call to my parents, and I was outed. Efforts were made to keep me from seeing Dom. Throughout high school, Dom’s stepmother intensified these efforts. He slept in the basement of the house. Although he was an incredibly talented student, he was prohibited from participating in any extracurriculars. He suffered a lot of physical abuse during those years.
The day he turned 18, he packed up everything he had and walked to my house, and we’ve lived together ever since. Things are better, but they’re not perfect. I’ve had trucks pull up next to me at stoplights and, seeing the pride sticker on my car, through old drinks and garbage into my window. I no longer speak to my dad’s side of the family. I haven’t been to see them for Christmas or Thanksgiving in years. One of my uncles had cornered me at Thanksgiving when I was 17 and said, “I’m not going to judge you, but I’d be happy to break your neck so God can do the judging a little sooner.”
I joined a support group for trans and intersex people. When I joined, 40 people attended regularly. Within the year, the group was half the size it had been. Some couldn’t make it anymore, because they were staying at the shelter, where their stay hinged on them agreeing to instead to attend homophobic sermons. Some were put in correctional therapy. Five of them died. Three of those, I didn’t know, but I knew Alex, the 19 year old who was fag-dragged in Kentucky and died a day later in the hospital, and I knew Stephanie, who went home to Alabama to care for her mom in hospice and was beaten to death with a baseball bat by her mom’s boyfriend.
Tumblr is not reality. The dynamic here does not reflect the dynamic out there. Here’s the part where I finally make a point, and it might be extremely unpopular - but guys, value your allies.Value each other. We are met with enough hate in our daily lives to enter an online safe-space and meet more hate from our own, over petty things. Don’t go after one another over every little thing you find problematic.
Learn to see nuance. Maybe the word “queer” bothers you, and you see a gay man using it as an umbrella term. Maybe someone called a trans man a trans woman because they’re confused about terminology, but the post where they did it was voicing support for the trans community. Maybe someone is just asking a question, wanting to learn more. Stop. Attacking. These. People.
Allies are being driven away. Members of our own community are being ostracized. Others are feeling nervous and estranged, and it’s largely because of places like Tumblr, where the social justice movement is quickly becoming violent and radical. I am begging you, stop nitpicking “problematic” things and start directing your efforts to create real change. When it comes to comes to your allies, forget the “social justice warrior” mentality and put down your torch. Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving. And I’m certainly not saying that your anger doesn’t have a good place - when you are met with bigots on the street, congress members who want to pass hateful laws, violent protesters, abusive parents, prejudiced teachers, that is when you need to be a warrior. That’s when it counts. In the real world. When you have the opportunity to protect people from real harm. Attacking your would-be allies via anonymous asks is just going to lose us ground in the long run. And we don’t have time for that, not when trans women of color are being murdered every day, not when states are still fighting against marriage equality, not when there are politicians in office who believe that trans people are possessed by demons, not when we’ve just lost 50 brothers and sisters to one gunman, not when the media won’t even admit that the attack was homophobic.
Please step back. Look at the big picture. Look at where we are, globally. Don’t just log on to your safe space and attack your allies over small missteps. That’s like washing the dishes in a house that’s on fire, kids. Let’s fight on the battlefield, and when we come home to each other, let’s just focus on bandaging up our wounds so we can go out and win the war.
Signal boost to this unbelievably important message.
I’d reblog this a thousand times if I could.
Stop attacking allies. Educate. Not hate.
This is incredibly important. Please read!
Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving.
Gonna Reblog this every time
I would argue on one point: “Tumblr is not reality.”
It would be more accurate to say “Tumblr is not the entirety of reality.”
Because, and I want to stress this, Tumblr is, in fact, real. It has the capacity to help, and it has the capacity to hurt. Most of the people that have been driven off didn’t leave because they just weren’t having fun anymore, they left because they were being hurt and chose not to continue being hurt.
Furthermore, Tumblr does have an impact on non-Tumblr reality. I’m not saying it’s a Massive Impact, but yeah, the way people get treated on Tumblr can and does affect how they behave outside of Tumblr.
One of the hardest things about counselling young LGBTQ+ people was convincing them that just because they’ve been rejected or shamed on Tumblr/Reddit/Tiktok, it does not mean they will be automatically rejected or shamed in all other LGBTQ+ community settings.
I’ve seen people absolutely convinced that there’s no room in the world for straight trans men, or asexuals, or bisexuals, or trans lesbians, or gay Christians, in part because the online spaces they dipped their toes into were incredibly hostile. So it’s pretty natural that if that experience was bad, something even more risky—like going to a meetup where they can see your face and might even recognize you as a person—doesn’t feel like a good idea at all.
We have so many hurdles to face. We have so many people who seek out our community because they honestly need the refuge. Let’s work on keeping it safe.
