Please be normal

“Tranny. Many people don’t know the history of the word, they assume it was an assigned hate term or slur along the lines of the “n” word. That’s not how it happened. Tranny was invented by us in Sydney, Australia in the 1970s where drag was a big deal, and still the best drag shows ever are in Sydney, Australia – they’re amazing. So a lot of trans-identified women who were assigned male at birth did drag, that’s how you made your living. And so they were transsexuals, transvestites, drag queens, and they were all doing drag to make money. They all bickered amongst each other who is better than who, “Well the drag queens are better,” “No, the transsexuals are better.” “You are all freaks, we’re better.” And on and on and on. But they worked together and they were family together, so they came up with a word that would say family and that was tranny. In Australia they do the diminutive, that’s how they come up with words. So tranny. I learned the word in the mid-1980s, late 1980s from my drag mom in San Francisco, Doris Fish, who was the city’s preeminent drag queen and she’d come from Sydney. And she schooled me in this word tranny, she said, “This way it means we’re family, darling.” “Thank you mama.” [...] So we used it and we were trannies together. And F to M was just beginning to start, the trans men were just beginning to become visible, Lou Sullivan was a neighbor of mine around the corner, and he was the first big out trans man, wrote his book. So trans men and cross dressers . . . cross dressers were also family. Transsexuals, we were all trannies and that felt good. That got into the sex industry and became a genre – there was tranny porn, there were tranny sex workers – chicks with dicks, she-males. [...] And, my only guess is that people who . . . because the only way they would have found out about the word is if they were watching tranny porn or having been with a tranny sex worker and then hated themselves so much that they turned it into a curse word. So it’s not really technically correct to say we’re reclaiming a word – it was always ours. So, many people mistake the word for the hatred behind the word and, in my generation, and I’m sure in future generations of trans people, tranny is going to be a radicalized, sexualized identity of trans in the same way that faggot is a prideful identity in the gay male community – not all gay men are faggots, but those who are are proudly fags and those who are dykes are proudly dykes within the lesbian community, trannies are proudly tranny within the transgender community. Does that mean we can’t call ourselves that because some trans woman does not want to be called a tranny? No. I’m going to keep calling myself a tranny. To the trans woman who gets called tranny, I’m sorry – as soon as . . . you’ve got to look at why you’re getting called tranny and if you don’t pass, you’re going to be read as a transgender person and then you fall back on the cultural view of trans folk which is freak, disgusting, not worth living, we can hurt you. It has nothing to do with the word, it has everything to do with the cultural attitude. So the word has stirred up a shit storm, but it’s not the word.”

- kate bornstein on the word ‘tranny’

Help A Teenage Girl Evacuate Gaza!

Hi everyone, I'm reposting this one from Instagram, illustration is by myself and depicts Amal. She reached out to me to share her story and her evacuation fund.

Amal's situation is exceedingly dire. She has faced extreme difficulty accessing food and medicine she desperately needs. Airstrikes and famine conditions have forced Amal to navigate an increasingly dangerous Gaza, in which she is already internally displaced. Amal is only 18 years old, and has been forced to give up her high school and college dreams in order to survive this genocide. Please join me in making sure this teenage girl has something to eat and a future to look forward to.

Remember, the minimum donation is only $5! Even a small donation will help tremendously, so don't be afraid to give what you can! Don't forget to share if you can't donate!

(Disclaimer: I am not Palestinian, I was just asked to share this fundraiser.)

i don't know much about art but i think my favourite painting is the banjo lesson by henry ossawa tanner

I think weaponizing peoples kinks and fetishes against them because it's "weird" is kinda not cool.

Hello, today is my birthday, and I would like to share a comic I made in the last year with you. It's called Broomistega and Thrinaxodon.

This comic was originally printed with yellow, fluorescent pink, light teal, and violet risograph inks. Physical copies are available in my shop.

FUCK. honestly just FUCK. We missed a very important day yesterday.

i think a lot of white queer/trans people need to hear that "breaking gender norms" isnt just wearing a dress while masc or dying your hair. its also unlearning the beauty standards that impose ideals of white beauty and attractiveness on non-white folks. yes you have a nose ring but i just heard you tell your black friend with meticulously cared for natural hair "you'd just look so nice with straight hair is all im saying..." why does your blog fetishizing i mean uh. appreciating trans women only feature skinny white women who pass. when societal gender norms are so inextricably tied to whiteness and emulating whiteness it is not enough to simply change your aesthetic. you need to defy the gender norms in your own head too.

Human Bill Cipher

(Based on Alex Hirsch's "canon" design)

And just to be clear, writing dissertations at me justifying why he should instead be a conventionally attractive twink will involuntarily cause me to draw him with even fewer teeth.

nobuddy feels like they have a sharp attention span these days, right? and we all just click “agree on terms of service” because its hard to love yourself sometimes, well

enter Terms of Service, Didn’t Read: a website and a browser addon that streamlines the terms of service of many popular web services to be read by the tech sunday drivers.

It’s graded from A (great) to E (awful) and if you have the addon you have access to the info about the website on your bar

extremely weird to think about the fact that the internet is a collection of physical objects, like, if i send a message to a person on another continent, there's a continuous physical path that each packet followed between each of our routers and it probably passes through an undersea cable which doesn't feel like something that should be real how did people manage that

Ending the stigma of drug use will save lives.

straight up not only is moralizing appearance shitty because people in your life will find out that you think they're ugly, it's also a suuuuper easy stepping stone to racism because a lot of features the zeitgeist deems "ugly" are features often found in marginalized groups.

Kid reported his father missing

Police torture him into making him confess to killing his father

Father is alive and well