Some of my friends have been expressing that they can’t make combo flags displaying the entirety of their identity due to the virtual absence of non-satirical cis and straight flags, so I decided to take a whack at it! Please note that straight people cannot use the Queer Cis flag and cis people cannot use the Trans Straight flag. These flags are for individuals who are still part of the LGBTQIA+ community in some way.
Okay, so. Why does a cis queer flag need to exist? That’s just a variant of “CiS pRiDe”. You don’t need to be proud to be a CIS queer. There’s no pride in that. That’s like making a white queer flag alongside existing black queer flags. It’s ???????
Straight trans is fine. Straight trans people should absolutely have pride in being straight trans people, because they get othered for being straight in LGBT spaces (e.g. “straights DNI”).
But “queer CIS pride” is offensive.
Like. Imagine if someone started yelling, “But!! But!!!!!! White trans people deserve pride too!!!!” or “But!!!! Cis PoC deserve positivity too!!!!” in a positivity post for trans PoC
There’s really nothing wrong with cis queer pride. Cis queer pride and straight trans pride are two sides of the same coin, to get upsets at one but not the other is rather hypocritical. Cis and straight are both majorities, they’re both considered the ‘norm’ by many. There is pride in breaking the ‘norm’ one way and not another, no matter what part of the ‘norm’ you keep. You can personally find this offends you, but your opinions are not universal fact
And your comparison of cis black people and white trans people on a trans poc post makes no sense, because you’re the one derailing a post in this situation. Op made this post as a positivity thing for his friends and you’re derailing it. White trans people and cis black people derailing a trans poc post? Annoying, unnecessary, not a good thing. Op making his own post? Thats what this site is for
I made these flags so my friends could make combination flags describing the whole of their identities. It wasn’t necessarily about pride, but the ability to have a simple visual representation, and for my queer cis friend, toacknowledge being cis as to not other her friend group. Like cis people who put their pronouns in their bios, she wanted a flag to at least personally normalize: “Hey, I’m cis. Other people aren’t. And a couple of my non-cis friends felt like their flags gave them a tacked-on ‘otherness’ quality because being cis is so ‘normal’ that I only have to visually mention my orientation.” She doesn’t want a queer cis flag for pride, but simply for her personal friends’ comfort in their pride. It’s an act of solidarity for her, and I support it.
Also, gay trans PoC here, I know that derailing, and you’re the one doing it. I get where you’re coming from, but where theseflags are coming from are not “CiS/sTrAiGhT pRidE”. Please notice how I specifically avoided the word pride to refer to these flags.
Ah ok my apologies, I misunderstood the intention of your post
Ah! No, I was addressing @guiltyidealist and just wanted to add on to the whole conversation. I can now see that I was a bit vague as to who I was talking to!
Shawn Mendes appears on our new cover. He has three Number One albums, legions of fans and amazing hair — now, if he could just chill out. Read the story in full right here.
Zoë Kravitz appears on our cover. She grew up a flower child in the canyons of L.A. with her actress mom and a wild child in Miami and beyond with her rock-star dad. But she’s making her own way to the top. Read the story in full right here.
Aretha Franklin appears on our new cover. Inside, our story dives into the singer’s epic life, deep sorrow, and enduring mystery. Read it in full right here.
CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI: what’s the Flying Squadron? CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI: honey, I’m so glad you asked CATHERINE DE’ MEDICI: it’s a group of political agents who…
en este momento de mi vida siento que solo importa mi felicidad, qué mal si quedamos mal en el pasado, pero ya no me importa, y eso no significa que te haya perdonado y haya olvidado todo lo que me hiciste, significa que no voy a seguir recordando lo y te estoy olvidando completamente.
A reminder that it’s illegal in the USA to collect or sell the feathers of wild birds (and their eggs, bodies, and nests) even if you find them lying on the ground, unless you have a permit to do so. As in, actually illegal, not “outdated law everyone has forgotten about and is no longer enforced”. Eagle parts are extra illegal.
How about bones?? Not like bird specifically just animal bones in general. Also why is it illegal?? There so many birds ergo so many feathers no ones gonna miss em
The specifics depend on your state, the situation, and whether the species is a game animal, but usually, it’s illegal unless you are licensed (ex for educational purposes).
There really aren’t “so many birds”. The populations of many species are rapidly declining due to habitat loss and pollution. I’ve seen birds of prey autopsied and their insides are often coated in plastics. Pesticides and rodenticides wipe out truly horrifying numbers of larger birds - please only ever use mechanical traps for mice and rats, not poisons.
The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 was passed four years after the last passenger pigeon died. It discourages the personal and commercial collection of bird parts for very good reason.
Oh, Ship! Tag me in on this one, I’m ready!
So, the history of Wildlife law in the United States goes way back, actually, to the history of wildlife law in Great Britain.
See, in Ye Olden Days, the King was in charge of deciding who was and wasn’t legally allowed to hunt. This was a Big Deal, because many people needed to hunt to feed and clothe themselves and their families. If the King said “you can’t hunt anywhere near where you live because those are My Deer,” you were, well, fucked.
Eventually, this power of wildlife ownership was technically redelegated to parliment, but hunting often remained super inaccessible to anyone but the wealthy, privileged few.
So when people started coming here from there, it was a total free-for-all. You could hunt anywhere, anything! There were things to shoot in the US that had been extinct in the British aisles for centuries, even!
So not only were people hunting for food, clothing, to drive out unwanted animals (see: wolves), but also for the hell of it because they were allowed!
For a while though, hunting was still very much an “I need to eat” business. Can’t fault ‘em for eating, ya know?
But once Europeans became really established here, with cities and leisure time and fashion, things got way out of hand.
There were pretty much No laws dictating how many animals a person could take, or when and from where they could take them.
What’s more is, suddenly, it wasn’t just for food, it was for MASS PRODUCTION! You know what women REALLY wanted? Hats With Feathers. Lots Of Feathers.
People were already killing Many Birds, but not Enough. “We need to kill WAY MORE BIRDS and FASTER,” they said. So they made These Big Guns.
They were made for mounting on boats, and who gave a damn about ammo? ANYTHING that could presumably maim a duck was a go. They loaded them with pieces of tin, metal, shards of broken glass, ya know. The usual.
Then, at night, during Mating season, they’d go out onto the water, shine a light so that all the ducks raised their heads to investigate, fire the gun, and instantly decapitate hundreds of ducks a shot. It was wild.
So this was happening
And the REASON this was happening was there was a demand for these ducks, feathers, mainly. Meat second.
The demand is what’s imperative here. It didn’t matter if you had the means to kill 100 or 1000 birds in a night. If you shot ‘em, someone would pay for ‘em.
You can see where this started going wrong, however. Eventually, there were like, uh, no birds left to shoot.
So now everyone’s starting to say, “well, what the hell…it seems that shooting All Of The Birds At Once has somehow wiped them out. Maybe we should do something about this.”
NOW, that was NOT a popular move. People were really loving the whole “I can kill anything any time I want” thing going on. They argued that limiting their take would violate their rights and freedoms (never mind the hypocrisy of claiming any rights to the wildlife of this land that had been taken from the indigenous peoples they’d killed and driven out).
But responsible hunters knew that wildlife and hunting laws were imperative to the continued existence of wildlife.
This wasn’t a new concept, mind you. Responsible Wildlife laws are even in the damn Old Testament:
“If you come across a bird’s nest in any tree or on the ground, with young ones or eggs and the mother sitting on the young or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young.” Deuteronomy 22:6
Makes sense, right? Eat the eggs but make sure the mother remains to lay more.
And more than a century before, John Quincey Adams is quoted in reference to the issue:
“I went with my gun down upon the marshes, but had no sport. Game laws are said to be directly opposed to the liberties of the subject; I am well persuaded that they may be carried to far, and that they really are in most parts of Europe. But it is equally certain that where there are none, there is never any game; so that the difference between the country where laws of this kind exist and …where they are unknown must be that in the former very few individuals will enjoy the privilege of hunting and eating venison, and in the latter this privilege will be enjoyed by nobody.”
ANYWAY. Point was, people were realizing that if things didn’t change fast, there’d be nothing left to hunt, to eat, or to use for Fancy Hats.
So we got the Lacey Act of 1900, the first federal wildlife law.
“I have always been a lover of birds, and I always been a hunter as well, for today there is no friend that the birds have like a sportsman-the man who enjoys legitimate sport. He protects them out of season; he kills them with moderation in season.” John Lacey.
It limited market-hunting and commercial wildlife trafficking. People with Super Duck Guns were especially unhappy about this. However, if ducks understood federal laws, they would’ve been thrilled.
The problem was, there was still a HUGE demand for feathers, for meat, and absurdly, for specimen for people’s private collections. “I don’t CARE if that’s the last known living Auk. I want it.”
So they had it.
What we needed to do was to destroy the demand for bird products. And to destroy the demand, we had to stop products from being made. If no one is walking down the street wearing a Fancy Bird Hat, no one else is going to say “oh! I want one too,” and no one is going to pay a Fancy Hat Maker to pay a Big Duck Gun owner to shoot 1,000 birds.
So we got the Migratory Bird Treat of 1918, which made it almost totally across the board illegal to own Any bird parts (excluding legal game birds, but laws about when and how many you could hunt were forming to protect them).
There is a misnomer that taking something off the legal market will increase demand because people love what they can’t have. That’s proven untrue in this case. Very few people are actually willing to break Actual Federal Law in order to own a hat they can’t wear in public. The issue was larger society and for the most part law-abiding citizens who wore this stuff while it was legal but moved on once it wasn’t.
The reason it still exists is to keep the demand for bird parts non-existent, and it’s WHY you can’t legally collect feathers even when they fall off a bird naturally.
Because hey, YOU may live in an area with a healthy golden eagle population. Or a Blue Jay population. Or Red headed woodpeckers. YOU find their feathers all the time! They just fall off, no harm done.
So you pick them up, make them into cool jewelry and art, and post them on your etsy and pinterest.
They’re super popular! People love them!
Now I want in on that business!
But there aren’t many golden eagles, blue jays, or woodpeckers around me, so I don’t find their feathers often. But you know what’s way easier than looking for one, fallen feather? Shooting a bird and getting a lot at once.
And thus an innocent market has once again created an unsustainable demand that will threaten bird populations.
And that’s why it’s just flat out against Federal US law to own, collect, or sell almost any wild bird parts!
And MAKE NO MISTAKE! This law is Very Enforced. Wildlife officers Do pay attention to people talking about collected bird parts, and they Will throw the book at you. The fines are wild. Don’t risk it.
