ask me how much I care about cishet atheists ‘coming out’ to their families as non-religious
There are communities where coming out as nonreligious will get you kicked out of the house, sent to reparative therapy, beaten, ostracized, and in some parts of the world jailed. There are communities where your parents will decide you’re unsafe to have around your siblings, and judges who will rule that you shouldn’t have custody of your children.
Ironically, those are similar risks faced by LGBT+ kids. So, yeah, I don’t know about you, but I’m inclined to care always about people who need my support.
ask me how I feel about people who claim to ~care always about people who need my support~ but who are totally ok with the idea of appropriating the phrase ‘coming out of the closet’ for things other than being lgbtq, which is incredibly homophobic and implies that being same-gender attracted or trans is a belief system or political stance, an idea that denies our reality and often puts us in incredible danger?
you know what? appropriation is a horrible destructive concept that directly makes it harder to fight oppression. I used to think I was just confused about it but the more I see it used the more I am convinced that, nah, it’s just terrible.
It directly serves the interests of oppressive power structures to set marginalized people at each others’ throats over who is stealing from who instead of relating to each other and thus helping each other. It feeds a simplistic understanding of privilege where no one has overlapping marginalizations or benefits from comparing aspects of their own experiences. It suggests that every kind of harm is completely independent and could never be understood in relation to other harms, which stops us from getting at the roots of harmful systems. It is evil and it is malicious and it is bullying masked as activism.
Kids who realize that they can’t live the lives their parents envision for them, and can’t tell their parents the truth without risking bodily harm, have a great deal in common with each other no matter what specific lie they are living. It is entirely a positive thing for those kids to feel solidarity with the entire vast broad community of people with similar problems. Is being trans at all the same thing as being gay? No. But is it useful to have a word that applies to both experiences? Hell yes. In this thread there were dozens of LGBT+ atheists who said that coming out as an atheist was much harder than coming out as LGBT+. There are also LGBT+ people who found it much easier. Do you know how you navigate something like that? You give everyone access to solidarity. You say “we have things in common, let’s fight for each other”.
You don’t say “how dare you have the nerve to compare /your/ experience of being kicked out of your home and disowned by your parents at the age of 14 to my experience of being kicked out of my home and disowned by my parents at the age of 14.” No one benefits from that. Literally no one.
As for the idea that it’s ~bad politics~ to suggest that being LGBT+ is a choice, guess what? Some people choose to be trans. Some people choose to be gay. Some people do think of their sexuality or their gender identity as a choice, and that is okay, because the actual fundamental point is that there isn’t anything wrong with it. It’s not okay to tell people that feeling like their identity is political or is a belief is an evil and malicious act against you.
As for me being incredible homophobic, sure, I’ll cop to that. The Incredible Homophobe, equally good at oppressing gay and bi girls and at kissing them. I should put it on a t-shirt.
“Kids who realize that they can’t live the lives their parents envision for them, and can’t tell their parents the truth without risking bodily harm, have a great deal in common with each other no matter what specific lie they are living. It is entirely a positive thing for those kids to feel solidarity with the entire vast broad community of people with similar problems.”
slam fucking dunk
Endorsed
I’m a bigger fan of
You don’t say “how dare you have the nerve to compare /your/ experience of being kicked out of your home and disowned by your parents at the age of 14 to my experience of being kicked out of my home and disowned by my parents at the age of 14.” No one benefits from that. Literally no one.
One of the things I find frustrating about my normal style of wanting to engage stuff, is that most people don’t want to, and it’s borderline socially unacceptable now, and it’s my standard way of compiling stuff in my head: I look at multiple sides and thought-experiment through them. Now you really have to do this quietly if you’re doing this about politics or social issues, and keep it to yourself. But what is annoying is not being able to do this about very much of anything. You can’t have a detached discussion anymore. About anything. EVERY possible topic has been overrun by emotionality and deep deep social and emotional *fraughtness* and its a grave social error to not respect this. Or worse - people read far more attachment and emotional investment into my discussions than I ever intended, because we have grown so unused to this style of engagement. (And even worse. I get flustered or animated during the discussion at any point, it becomes “well OBVIOUSLY you have deep feelings about this.”)
There’s someone I really enjoy talking to except they always read my “what ifs” as positions I’m married to instead of me throwing ideas around and analyzing from all sides, and getting upset at some of my ideas and feeling the need to strongly indicate they disagree, but I am not making any fixed statements so there’s nothing to disagree or agree with or get mad at? They could just contribute by pointing out the downsides? Doesn’t anyone want to have this kind of discussion?
Like. I understand the WHYs of all of this now, I’m not a social idiot. I wasted years of my life learning how to engage outside of old nerd culture. Part of my social game now is to simply not engage this way except on paper, out of the mouths of fictional characters, and or with the couple of people who really get it and won’t misconstrue where I am coming from.
But it feels like we are in a new social space where the culture around conversation has changed and abstract, cerebral discussions and Socratic dialogs are much much harder to have.
But what if this IS how you like to engage? What if it’s a love language? Worse, it’s the way I normally think, meaning I have to run every thought I have through an updated Norms 2.0 compiler before speaking about anything non-superficial. It’s so much more fraught now.
‘But what if this IS how you like to engage? What if it’s a love language? Worse, it’s the way I normally think, meaning I have to run every thought I have through an updated Norms 2.0 compiler before speaking about anything non-superficial. It’s so much more fraught now.’
like 99% of “men and women are soooo different!!!” comedy is literally just describing the experience of not understanding other people. like it’s not that women never say what they mean talking to other people is just like that. it can be hard to understand what other people are thinking. bioessentialism really rots the brain
“women will say I’m fine and then not mean it” yeah that’s something literally everybody does. is this your first time interacting with another human being my guy
Often it’s specifically “people are weird in ways I only notice when I’m trying to date and/or sleep with them”
seeing as we’ve moved on from “this would kill a Victorian child (the same ones that snorted cocaine for a head cold)” to “this would kill a medieval peasant” I just have to say. you can’t eat a meal without your phone or tv blasting shit directly into your brain and you get all of your social interaction and conflict resolution skills from moral posturing on the internet leading to massive arguments inside of discord servers. you think that medieval peasant whose been toiling fields since age 2 unwashed covered in smallpox scars just witnessed a man get dragged through town until his skin got roadrashed off because he stole an apple is gonna melt because they heard your garbage lemon demon playlist? you have to make your mutuals trigger tag naruto because it reminds you of your ex who kinned sasuke mothefucker YOU would melt instantly if you were in the pit at a Shakespeare play
I’m thinking back to the sudden vitriolic hate campaign around Zoe Quinn/Gamergate that provided a point for angry young men to coalesce around - and once they were in a fixed communal point online, it was so much easier to deliver extremist messaging to them.
Me: I have tried and tested my physical boundaries for 15 years, I know what I can and can’t do. I’m not a school child any more, nobody can force me to actively and knowingly hurt myself. CripplePunk4eva it’s a revolution I suppose.
Also me: Pain is temporary, the social repercussions of not keeping up and doing your part are not. Sure I can carry that thing as well :)
Visitor: [looks around incredulously] “But why? There’s no one else here.”
Me: “…well…there’s me?”
Visitor: [laughs] “You don’t have anything to worry about.”
Every day I’ll hear large groups pause outside the door, read the “masks recommended” sign, debate whether or not to put them on, and then say, “Oh, well, there’s no one here, just an employee. We don’t need them.”
Cool! Come inside and find out how good I am at spin kicks!
reblog to give retail and restaurant workers the right to spin kick unmasked entitled shitheads
the trans male experience is being afraid that if you wash your hands in a public men’s restroom you will be clocked
one time I went in the men’s room at a bar, got clocked and told I needed to leave so later I walked up to that dude at a table with some chick and announced to her that He Doesn’t Wash His Hands After Handling His Dick and walked away
you are quite literally braver than any U.S. marine
No matter how progressive or well-read you are, there are always going to be moments in your life where somebody pushes back against something that’s so culturally ingrained you never even considered it before. And you’ll say “Huh, it never occurred to me to challenge this but you’re right” and that doesn’t mean you were “morally toxic” before, it means you’re a non-omniscient human capable of growth.
truly makes me sick and angry that Africa so far has only been able to vaccinate 1% of the whole continent’s population bc the whole western world is herding vaccines and wont share the patent with poor countries, so much for black lives matter
my fellow EU citizens here’s a link to a petition bc it’s more than time that we suspend the covid vaccine patents so that every country can afford the vaccines!!!!
I swear to god that’s the exact reason people hate Americans so much, are you completly fucking dumb, have you read the fucking news lately?? the US is literally one of the countries who is the furthest when it comes to vaccinating its people, why? oh because they are the only country who doesn’t share a single produced vaccine with other countries (which isnt something to be proud of btw) also when will Americans finally understand that A not everything is about you and B sharing and making things free isnt a bad thing, its literally the fucking opposite, oh and btw your people would also benefit from suspending patents bc your country would also save A LOT of money and could produce more which means more people could get the vaccine and even faster than now oh and also FUCK YOU
Also like… the biggest reason adults in the USA aren’t vaccinated is that they don’t WANT to be? My job has had vaccines available to ALL employees since FEBRUARY; our associated hospital is at 70% vaccination and holding. THESE ARE MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS AND THEY’RE NOT GETTING THEIR NO-COST VACCINE.
My wife had to go to a different hospital for hers and they said they were booked solid for 1000 appointments per day but were only having 600-650 people keep their slots. THESE ARE PEOPLE WHO WENT OUT OF THEIR WAY TO REPEATEDLY REFRESH A WEBSITE UNTIL APPOINTMENTS OPENED AND STILL DID NOT SHOW UP.
Even if you (commenter, not OP) believe “USA first” is just… enlightened self-interest, or something… it’s pretty clear that, even if we DIDN’T have more than we NEED… we have more than we WANT.
You know what you do with things you don’t want? That’s right, you give them away.
