The Book of Worlds was filled with scriptures like these. To be stood before those worn down to the frayed edges of their very spirits. She knew what needed to be done, she'd read the words hundreds of times, perhaps thousands... and yet?

Every opportunity to make use of the teachings weighed far too heavily on her spirit.

Ana'Hira's hands were steady as she set down a chilled cup of Ganne Ka Ras before @ifyouwouldloveme. A recipe that belonged to her daughter's foster mother, equal parts the taste of a warm home and a comforting anchor to imbibe.

"You did what you thought was best. Running as you have is only ever healthy as a sprint... marathoning it changes you immeasurably."

THE CALL.

shaking this lovely guy by the shoulders becos Humansongs just *perfectly* captures the love and wonder behind a lot of early 2000s and 2010s meta songs about the vocaloids being computer programs/instruments.

like honestly its right up there with odds & ends, miku, and tell your world for me. And while Sad Machine isn't explicitly about vocaloid so I don't regard it the same way I would, say, I'm your diva or Packaged...for me personally its only like one step removed from them. I still love it just as much and in almost the exact same way.

I could write so much about my love for humansongs and my general hopes for the vocaloid community following it and po-uta's release. But for now I just wanna express how surprised I felt when I read Porter's tweet because he's always felt like a vocaloid producer and fellow community member to me. And I hope he knows there's a lot of people out there that feel the same way

2 + 2 = 6

My Deltarune Pet Peeve is criticizing Toriel for being an emotiobally absent mother, making a speech about how all of Toriel's flaws are major problems in Kris's life, ignoring she's a single working mom with a full-time job in which she can't afford to snap at anyone because she's the authority figure in the room, because she's the emotional pillar for a lot of people, and then say nothing about how Asgore 'forgets his kids physical boundaries' 'unemployed to the point he's facing eviction' 'maintains a facade of strength when he's a deppressed mess' Dreemurr might've affected Kris's ability to care for themselves. Or even regarding Asriel, who had the time to look after Kris, and a better place to ask them what's affecting them, and a tracked history of maintaining distance from Kris while his friends bully them, but who doesn't get entire paragraphs described to how he might've created Kris's dependent state.

It takes more than one parent to raised a child y'know???

(This isn't a post to shit on Asriel OR Asgore. For all their failings, they're flawed but kind people who want to help people. Asriel himself was young when his parents divorced, and presumably couldn't rely on anyone for his own problems. Asgore... was a cop, which IS a moral failing, but he also doesn't deserve shit for being at the butt end of society, unemployed, alone, being C. Holiday's financial chew toy, and without the ability to ask for help without being a huge burden for somebody else. But if you are capable of understanding that, then you are also capable of understanding Toriel has not had the freedom to suddenly intervene in her child's life without fear of 'being an over-controlling parent', and making Kris's situation worse.)

Toriel IS aware Kris has problems, that's why she pushes them to go outside and connect to people! It's why she gets so happy Susie's there! It's why she asks Alphys how they're doing!

Toriel is also probably aware that Kris is more than a bit sensitive, that they like their privacy, that pushing them too hard will make them deppressed and keep on having self-esteem issues! It's why she's so hesitant to actually intervene!

All things considered, Toriel is a good mother, of course people like her, and more definitely, Kris likes her.

unfortunately i have to see discourse on my dash every day that makes me think some of y'all are really only posturing about the whole being a gender weirdo freak thing

"can you treat a trans woman as an equal if she has visible facial hair, or a trans man who has visible breasts?" is a good starting point but let me ask you some more questions.

could you have a normal conversation with a 50 year old transsexual who still considers himself a mother to his son? can you be in community with retransitioners and genderqueer people with non-normative transition trajectories? can you have a nice chat with someone who was afab and calls themself transfemme, or with someone who was amab and calls themself transmasc?

and even more! do you welcome the guy in a dress who calls himself a transvestite and has been doing drag every saturday for the past 10 years to your pride parade? are you willing to hear out the young woman who had bottom surgery at 18 and now kinda wishes she didn't? do you actually respect the people who decide not to go on hrt or to get surgery due to their family's medical history?

they may be hypothetical to you, but those are the people i have met and hang out with every day.

and you might answer yes to all of these, obviously, but could you actually say that when actually meeting them? because i've seen for myself that, no, the hypothetical and reality don't always align.

All the recent discourse about gatekeeping in the tabletop RPG community has got me toying with the idea of a short-form game where you play as literal gatekeepers

I'm thinking one of those "one player, many GMs" dealies. A session begins with brainstorming a gate of some description: it could be an interdimensional portal, a gate of horn and ivory between the waking world and the land of dreams, the literal gates of Hell, whatever. Each player then creates a guardian for the gate; for example, in the gates-of-dreamland scenario, a group of three players might consist of a giant two-headed snake (with one head that always speaks the truth and one head that always lies, naturally), a singing pillar of lambent crystal, and an apparition which takes the form of the querent's mother. Probably this would use a playbook-driven approach which boils the various possibilities down to several broad archetypes.

Play consists of a rotating spotlight in which one player assumes the role of a randomly generated interloper who wants to pass through the gate (in or out!), and the others play as their guardian characters and figure out what to do with this shmuck.

this is probably shaped by my limited frame of reference, but im really fascinated by witnessing the real-time development of adhd as a diagnosis. people attribute so many symptoms to it now or maybe they always did? i was wondering if you have any thoughts on what is the use of adhd specifically as a category within psychiatry. I'm esl so sorry for any confusing wording

no you're right imo; diagnostic categories are always somewhat in flux ofc but ADHD is one that has seen a particularly pronounced shift in the last couple decades. obviously this is multifactorial but my observation goes something along these lines:

'hyperactivity' has been dx'd in children since about the 1950s (also when Ritalin hit the market) but the ADHD dx doesn't really take off until the 90s (also when Adderall, a 2nd-gen reformulation of the 'obesity' drug Obetrol, hit the market). so, it's not all that surprising that 20 years later you see increased patient awareness of the diagnosis, increased popular interest in it, and shifting / expanding ideas of what it means and what ADHD 'is'. it's a relatively young dx.

part of the reason it's young is because it's basically a 'biopsychiatric' dx, meaning it diagnoses certain behaviours as being a 'brain problem' rather than having social causes or context. in practice this is complicated because psychs do use pharmacological approaches in conjunction with psychodynamic ones all the time; nevertheless, the central promise of DSM ADHD and its pharmaceutical treatments has consistently been that the ADHD subject has a physiological, neurological disorder / dysfunction / aberration, and that the drug treatments on the market fix it. that none of this is actually empirically supported is conceptually inconvenient and entrenched by the research process.

the biopsychiatric narrative is worth paying attention to because the context here is one in which it has become commonly accepted that behavioural 'disorders' and affective distress of various kinds can be, basically, either of pure biological origin, or else Your Fault. in the case of childhood hyperactivity, Your Fault historically also included Your Mother's Fault; part of the reason many mothers embraced Ritalin in the 50s and 60s was because the proffered pharmaceutical narrative explicitly challenged the idea that these mothers had done something 'wrong' to result in their (mostly) sons exhibiting disruptive and hyperactive behaviour.

this dichotomy of biology vs personal failing is very overtly present in quite a bit of discourse around ADHD today. if it's my brain being 'wrong' or different, then it's not something I've done wrong but a disease with a simple chemical fix. in this context I don't think it's surprising at all that a lot of popular and patient conceptions of ADHD have seen a considerable widening over the past few decades. often people like to blame this on pharmaceutical companies, and it's true that industry benefits from these discourses and frequently invests in them (eg, via instruments like ADDitude mag). however, that's a pretty simplistic explanation on its own and doesn't really account for the ways in which patients and potential patients also find this diagnostic category personally useful, for reasons ranging from identity-formation to the desire to access prescription amphetamines. ADHD increasingly shows up as a biologised explanation for behaviours ranging from 'eating too many sweets' to 'postural sway' and so on. you can see in such examples how invoking the idea of an aberrant ADHD brain is both reassuring to people who have been made to feel ashamed of certain behaviours, and provides a sense of shared identity and community with others.

all of this is to say: I don't find it surprising at all when I see a relative broadening of notions of ADHD, almost always expressed in biological terms (the 'ADHD brain' operates differently, 'seeks dopamine', causes this or that). ADHD is in some ways a particularly blatant distillation of this general trend in popular psychiatric discourses, for reasons relating to expectations about childhood and child behaviour, and the historical and present relationship between the ADHD label and the regulation of amphetamines. but much of what's happening with ADHD in terms of popular discourses about it can also be seen with many, many other psychiatric diagnoses, to varying extents and in various ways.

my experience writing about ADHD on this website leads me to close by explicitly stating the following: I do not think any ADHD behaviours / symptoms are people's 'fault' or an individual failing; I do not think using drugs for any reason is morally bad or needs to be justified; the fact that I do not think ADHD is a 'brain disease' does not mean I think people are 'making it up' or exaggerating wrt any difficulties they experience personally, professionally, emotionally, &c.

I understand what people mean by prison abolition, but what does it mean in practice to abolish the family? I've never quite got it - who is raising children? How does it work? I'm asking in good faith, I've just always been a bit embarrassed to ask anyone

Like positions that are “anti-work” or against “gender,” the thing being objected to is more detailed and specific than the range of meanings that can reasonably or semi-reasonably be assigned to the word in question (“work,” “gender,” “family”)—which is why these propositions and programmes can have a bit of a PR problem. And, as with all terms that position themselves against something (e.g. "anti-psychiatry"), the term "family abolition" can be taken up by people with a range of different positions who disagree amongst themselves on some issues. In general, though, no one objects to "people living together or being emotionally close to each other" or "children not being left to roam about at random and get eaten by wolves" or anything.

Rather, anti-capitalist objections to "the family" tend to hinge on objections to:

parental rights, or "the special legal powers of parents to control major aspects of their children’s lives," which function as "quasi-property interests" more than anything that is in the best interest of children (link explicitly relates to U.S. law). Parents legally control where their children live, whether and where they go to school, what information they have access to, what level of freedom of mobility they have, what medical care they receive and don't receive, and what they may do with their own bodies, and are legally allowed to physically assault their children.

relatedly, the lack of legal autonomy that children possess (this is also often discussed under the banner of "children's rights" or objections to "adultism").

the positioning of "the family" as the only economic or social "safety net" in an economy and a society which provide no other one (creating an artificial "structural scarcity" of care). In a society which is otherwise dominated by "economic competition between atomized individuals," the family must be relied on—and yet, for some people (whose families cannot or will not provide living space or financial support in an emergency; whose families are abusive and physically or psychically dangerous to be around or rely on; who will not receive help or emotional support from a spouse or family unit without making serious concessions on the level of their personhood being basically respected; Black working-class people in whose communities the nuclear family unit has been deliberately prevented from forming by government intervention), the family cannot be relied on.

the way that the positioning of "the family" as the only safety net therefore constitutes economic coercion that works to keep people (especially women and LGBT, disabled and/or transracially adopted people) in abusive or exploitative situations, and that works to create incentives for working-class women (whose employment is generally less secure) to make themselves erotically desirable to men & disincentives for doing anything else.

the idea that housework, gestational labour & childbirth, and childcare are tasks "naturally" falling to the "mother" ("mother" as a "natural category"), such that the social, political, and economic nature of these tasks, and the economic and political discourses that mobilise the creation of our concept of "motherhood," are obscured.

Thus the objection is to "the family" as a unit of social reproduction under capitalism—as a legal, political entity that structures inheritance, taxes, health insurance, "race" and ethnicity, &c., and therefore works as a sort of interface between the capitalist state and the individual.

So the programme of "family abolition" involves, firstly, the control of the means of production on the part of the proletariat (this is a communist programme—the point isn't to remove the safety net of the family while keeping capitalism in place, but rather the idea is that without capitalism this ultimately abusive safety net ought not to be needed); and then the abolition of marriage as a legal institution; the abolition of parental rights; the putting in place of measures for the elderly and disabled to be cared for regardless of whether they have family alive who are both able and willing to care for them; the forming of social networks at will; and, depending on who you ask, the communal raising of children (which involves ceasing to privilege "parent" as a legal title automatically conferred upon biologically creating a child).

Obviously, toddlers who do not yet understand things about the world including "causation" and "mortality" will need on occasion to be restrained from running blithely into the jaws of wolves &c. The argument is just that coercion of this sort should be legitimately in the best interests of the child; not performed by two people who need answer for their actions, up to and including battery of their children, in no way other than saying that they "plausibly believe this to be necessary to control, train or educate their child"; and walked back in measure as the child gains the ability to assert their own desires.

Probably no one has a perfect solution 100% worked out—life is messy, and we don't know what the future will look like—but having a perfect solution 100% worked out should not be a prerequisite for noticing that the current situation is abusive and untenable.

Since the discourse has reared its ugly head once more, the simple answer is no.

Aang was not a deadbeat, unsupportive, absentee father.

He loved all three of his children and was supportive of them. When Kya came out in the comics, she mentioned straight up that Aang was nothing but supportive of her and who she was. Aang made mistakes in parenting, but he was also stuck in one of the worst situations possible for him.

For one thing, it's been stated that Airbending culture has different views when it comes to family dynamics. Never once does Aang mention his parents, and it's clear that Air Nomads did not put emphasis on the standard nuclear family organization that other nations did. From context clues alone, and many have inferred in the past that Air Nomads were communal, so it stands to reason that their parenting was communal. Monks, Nuns, Masters—all of them were most likely parents to every single child. The responsibility of raising and educating a child was shared amongst the nomads, and that there was no real difference between biological and adoptive parents. Airbenders shared nearly everything, and that meant family as well.

Imagine you're Aang, spending twelve years of life being raised by every adult in the temple. Sure, he was exposed to nuclear family dynamics when visiting other nations and befriending Bumi and Kuzon, but his exposure to their culture was most likely limited. Now, not only is he a father to three beautiful children, but he must raise them in a way foreign to him. There are no other Monks to raise his children—it's just him and Katara. I've no doubt that Sokka and Toph chipped in whenever they could to ease the burden of parenthood, but they were leaders and figures of great importance as well. Not to mention that Toph had her own daughters to take care of.

Aang is also the Avatar, the central spiritual figure amongst the four nations. His presence would always be demanded in other nations. Peace Summits. Negotiations. Ceremony. Dealing with splintered Fire Nation cells and loyalists. Aang had to lead the people of all four nations back into balance, and he was in the unique and unenviable position to heal the scars of a 100 year war due to the absence of the Avatar.

Finally, the dude is also the Very Last Airbender. Of course he'd show favoritism to Tenzin. Bumi was a non-bender and Kya was a waterbender already taking after her mother. Aang was a war hero, a political figure, a man out of time and history, the Avatar, and the Only Living Airbender. The weight of his culture and people all rested on his shoulders, and so he passed on that responsibility and hope to the only other living Airbender at the time. Aang needed to spend time with Tenzin because only through Tenzin could the practices of the Air Nomads survive.

Aang was basically having to transition from a communal family mindset to a nuclear family's; he had to balance romance, fatherhood, and being the Avatar in a Wartorn World; and he had an obligation to every Airbender in history—millions of souls and their memories, passed on from one very flawed father to his newborn son. Every part of Aang's life as a father was met with trials and tribulations, and his family still came out loving him, albeit with some resentment underneath.

No parent is perfect, and Aang could have done so much better when it came to communicating with his children.

But none of his mistakes ever meant he was an abusive, cold, distant father.

He was overworked, acclimating to a style of family not his own, and desperately reviving a century-long dead culture all by himself. The fact that every single one of his kids still loved him and cherished him only solidified the fact that Aang was a father who did his very best.

Being the child of the Avatar would always mean living in his shadow. That resentment, of Aang being needed by the world while his children sought him out, would always be there. Doubly so for Tenzin, who grew up with the Avatar as his father and continued his life-long work of breathing life back into the Air Nomads. Say what you will, but at least Bumi and Kya had the freedom to choose who they wanted to be. Tenzin, no matter what, would always grow up to be the Airbending Master because no one else could.

Aang loved his children. Aang loved his wife. And they in turn loved him. But just like every family, complications rose up and planted the seeds of bitterness and resentment. The only thing that stopped these from blossoming into actual dislike of their family was that Aang's love and respect for his children was always genuine, and that Katara stood firm in making sure their children knew they were beloved.

Aang and Katara's family would never have been ideal in the first place, but they did their best.

And their best was certainly enough.

I've seen a lot of discourse about Virginia Kull's portrayal of Sally Jackson in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians TV series, and I'd like to say that I loved her. Don't get me wrong. I love Sally from the original book series, and I, too, would fight the God of War on her behalf. But something that I enjoyed about Virginia's portrayal of Sally that we don't get in the books is the character depth. We don't hear much of Sally's backstory in the TV series, apart from a couple of flashbacks with younger Percy and that scene with Poseidon (Toby Stephens). However, those scenes do an excellent job of showing us that alongside being Percy's mother, Sally is also a young woman who fell in love with a man she could not be with and is enduring the natural consequences of having Percy. She struggles to communicate with him when she's frustrated, gets teary-eyed when she lies to him to prolong the inevitable, and actively sacrifices her happiness to ensure his safety. Virginia Kull's portrayal of Sally Jackson reinforces the character's humanity, imperfections, and determination, and it's everything to me.

Look what Google just recommended to me!!!!

I already own (and love) Shabbat and Portico.

But I am OBSESSED with the rest and must acquire them immediately.

Top of my list is Love Japan because LOOK AT THIS BEAUITFUL BOWL OF MATZO BALL RAMEN!!!!!

We hear a lot about Jewish people in Europe and MENA, but we do not hear a lot about Jewish culture as it blends with East Asian cultures, and that’s a shame. Not just because it erases the centuries of Jewish populations there, but also because there are plenty of people of mixed decent. People who may not have come directly from Jewish communities in East Asia, but people who have a Japanese Father and a Jewish Mother, for example. Or people in intercultural marriages. These are all real and valuable members of the Jewish community, and we should be celebrating them more. This cookbook focuses on Jewish Japanese American cuisine and I am delighted to learn more as soon as possible. The people who wrote this book run the restaurant Shalom Japan, which is the most adorable name I’ve ever heard. Everything about this book excites and delights me.

And of course, after that, I’m most interested in “Kugels and Collards” (as if you had any doubts about that after the #kugel discourse, if you were following me then).

This is actually written in conjunction with an organization of the same name devoted to preserving the food and culture of Jews in South Carolina!

I’m especially excited to read this one, because I have recently acquired the book Kosher Soul by the fantastic, inimitable Michael J. Twitty, which famously explores faith and food in African American Jewish culture. I’m excited to see how Jewish soul food and traditions in South Carolina specifically compare and contrast with Twitty’s writings.

I’m also excited for all the other books on this list!

A while ago, someone inboxed me privately to ask what I recommended for people to read in order to learn more about Jewish culture. I wrote out a long list of historical resources attempting to cover all the intricate details and historic pressure points that molded Jewish culture into what it is today. After a while I wrote back a second message that was much shorter. I said:

Actually, no. Scratch everything I just said. Read that other stuff if you want to know Jewish history.

But if you want to know Jewish culture? Cookbooks.

Read every Jewish cookbook you can find.

Even if you don’t cook, Jewish cookbooks contain our culture in a tangible form. They often explain not only the physical processes by which we make our meals, but also the culture and conditions that give rise to them. The food is often linked to specific times and places and events in diaspora. Or they explain the biblical root or the meaning behind the holidays associated with a given food.

I cannot speak for all Jews. No one can. But in my personal observation and experience—outside of actual religious tradition—food has often been the primary means of passing Jewish culture and history from generation to generation.

It is a way to commune with our ancestors. I made a recipe for chicken soup or stuffed cabbage and I know that my great grandmother and her own mother in their little Hungarian shtetl. I’ll never know the relatives of theirs who died in the Holocaust and I’ll never meet the cousins I should have had if they were allowed to live. But I can make the same food and know that their mother also made it for them. I have dishes I make that connect me to my lost ancestors in France and Mongolia and Russia and Latvia and Lithuania and, yes, Israel—where my relatives have lived continuously since the Roman occupation even after the expulsions. (They were Levites and Cohens and caretakers of synagogues and tradition and we have a pretty detailed family tree of their presence going back quite a long time. No idea how they managed to stay/hide for so long. That info is lost to history.)

I think there’s a strong tendency—aided by modern recipe bloggers—to view anything besides the actual recipe and procedures as fluff. There is an urge for many people to press “jump to recipe” and just start cooking. And I get that. We are all busy and when we want to make dinner we just want to make dinner.

But if your goal isn’t just to make dinner. If your goal is to actually develop an understanding of and empathy for Jewish people and our culture, then that’s my advice:

Read cookbooks.

Tiefling anatomy HC’s

I CANT BE STOPPED.

-tieflings are born with horns that curve flush to their little baby skulls. They’re initially smaller and kinda squishy to touch.

-they will grow and harden in the coming months after their birth, roughly taking the shape that they will keep for the rest of their lives.

-tieflings shed their horns just once in their lifetime, usually after they’ve lost all their baby teeth and as an early step in puberty for a young tiefling.

-lots of doting parents will keep their tiefling childs “baby horns” like how some parents will keep baby teeth as a keepsake.

-Omg imagine like, a kid losing one, and the other is kinda wiggly just hanging in there.

-they tie some cord around the loose horn and the other end to a door

-all the dumb cliches humans do for loose teeth. (Oh no it’s so cute)

-the adult horns come in much bigger and harder than the baby horns.

-a tiefling tail can betray a lot about how a tiefling is feeling. Depending on how it whips and curves in a conversation can tell you if a tiefling is happy, scared, or angry. It’s called a “tell-tale-tail”. HAH. GEDDIT?

-canonically tiefling will often wrap their tails around their waists or legs when in crowds or around strangers, to avoid them getting stepped on or tugged.

-Tieflings have blood vessels and nerve endings that extend from their fingertips and into their nails, like a cats. 

-Also like cats' nails, they have a “quick”, that if trimmed will bleed and is very painful. 

-This is why all tieflings seem to have elongated nails, even if they are in a position or profession that longer nails would be a hindrance. A tieling can file their nails to be more blunt, but a tiefling would never purposefully trim their nails too short and cut the quick. 

-I imagine there being a big discourse around trimming a young tieflings nails, (probably done by an ignorant non-tiefling parent, or the care givers at orphanages) as it’s considered inhumane… like declawing cats

-there are brands of inner-race discrimination in tiefling communities. Most prominent being how far back the infernal blood can be traced.

-a teifling line that is generations upon generations old (like, their great great great great great grandmother slept with a cambion for example ) is held in higher esteem than a first generation tiefling, because the “taint” is so far removed, and that family has had generations to establish themselves in the tiefling community and culture.

-a first generation tiefling (like, their mother was a cambion, for example) is looked down upon because the “taint” is much more immediate.

-also canonically, a group of 3 or more tieflings is called a “curse” of tieflings (derogatory)

Hey this might be a weird question but you seem to know a lot about the strategies TERFs use and what they're hiding, so I just wanted to ask and you don't have to answer.

Why do so many TERFs have this weird hostility towards bi and ace people? I don't think either of those identities have anything to do with being trans but I've seen so many TERFs who are also biphobic and/or aphobic. My gut instinct was that there was some large overlap between bi/ace people and trans people, but then I've found TERFs give shit to cis bis and aces so I'm not sure if it's that or some other reason. I'm not trans myself but I want to be able to recognize TERF rhetoric to be a better ally to trans people.

A couple reasons.

First one is that hating bis/aces is at the entrance of the TERF pipeline; they utilize this 'soft bigotry' to radicalize LGBTs and it usually looks like this:

To recruit queer ppl first they try to get us to stop considering aces as Oppressed. That's how it starts. They're aren't Doing anything so how can they be oppressed? They don't know what it's like to marginalized....how could they? They're just stealing the spotlight of Actually oppressed ppl

And once you accept that they turn to bisexuals. Who are only half gay, you know? And most of them date men anyway or end up marrying men so like? How the hell would they know what it's like to literally Live oppression 24/7? Do we we really want them to have a voice and speak for those of us that don't have an escape from our oppression?

This works because on the surface TERFS/Radfems appear to care about women and gender equality, which a lot of queer people obviously support. But they exploit those of us that don't know enough about feminism's intersectional (and very gay) history to identify them as bad actors.

From here the person they've targeted will either a- accept this and likewise will eventually also accept that trans oppression isnt real either (fulfilling the TERF's actual goal of recruitment) OR b- they'll realize they've been manipulated and try to deconstruct.

Secondly:

TERFs are white supremacist and their beliefs are founded white supremacist ideology and outdated scientific theories that Support white supremacist rhetoric.

It's called gender-essentialism which is a branch of bio-essentialism which is the belief that the biological body you have has inherent skills and abilities. Racists have used this to deny Black humanity just as TERFs use it to deny the existence of gender diversity.

But nobody is inherently weaker because of a uterus, nor are they bad drivers just because they have a uterus. All women are not good mothers just because they are women. Men are not all abusers just because they are men.

TERFs would have you swallow these beliefs; they're vital to maintaining the Core TERF Value that that trans people aren't Real and people with uteri are always helpless victims to be defended against evil men.

And as white supremacists their goal is to disrupt and destroy minority communities so that we are too divided to unify against legal attacks. TERFs do this from the inside out by putting bis/aces in a different category from the other queers while disguising their bigotry as feminist. They get us to voluntarily undermine and destroy our own movement this way by causing intercommunity "bi/ace discourse" that makes bis/aces out to be an enemy of "real" oppressed people (like transphobic lesbians for example)

Thirdly:

Lots of queer people are feminists which makes us easy targets and that's why they focus on the queer community. Additionally, the queer community has a history of being a threat to the white supremacist establishment so dividing us is vital to their goal of eventually wiping out anyone who isnt cis, straight, white, neurotypical, and able bodied

Further Statement Regarding Suspension

So, the more I look into the situation, the more it's clear this was a coordinated harassment attempt from F//ateCE//O and the rest of his unhinged transphobic mob. Someone I followed was outed as a MAP, a fact I had zero clue about. I had previously promoted her patreon before knowing about this. When Fate's cronies mentioned it, I said to please go to the police with any criminal evidence, and also not to link me to triggering callout threads full of MAP discourse, which I stay the hell away from. This person had literally already deactivated on twitter so there was no one to unfollow. Idk what the point of any of it was. I literally wanted nothing to do with any of this and told everyone to go to the police for real, this was way above my pay grade. Also, fun fact nobody likes to mention, MY MOTHER WAS IN HOSPITAL AT THE TIME. I had a lot to worry about, and what to do with a potential criminal case (again, very long and unhinged callout thread from known liars and transphobes, so I have no idea about the veracity of any of these claims based on an untrustworthy background) that I have no jurisdiction over (as an internet person??? And not the FBI??) was not my top priority at the time.

That is it. I did not defend them. I did not advocate for pro contact. I said be succinct with your evidence so I don't get fucking triggered and also I AM NOT A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER. Anyway, that entire l0lichud side of twitter has turned on me and frothed themselves into a rage without actually listening to a word I said. Typical word of mouth bs. If my account isn't reinstated, I honestly may not even go back. The fact that the proship community has been invaded by these bigots and trolls on twt has been a fact that has continuously exhausted me. I've spoken about it extensively so I won't go into it here, but let me tell you, these people damage our reputation beyond repair, spread disinformation and bigotry, and I want nothing to do with any of them.

In 1976, when prolific writer, activist and self-described Black lesbian mother warrior poet Audre Lorde published her seminal poetry collection, Coal, the world wide web was still 17 years away from becoming a public-facing invention, and the platform of podcasting hadn’t even been dreamt up yet. The volume established her as a champion for women, Blackness, queerness and equity in the explosive 1970s Black Arts Movement—other works to come, like Sister Outsider, positioned Lorde as a justice-demanding mouthpiece for people who’d been shoved into the crosshairs of marginalization.

She was highly quotable and, in recent years as discussions about mental health and the prioritization of personal peace have become more frequent and fervent, one of her most notable lines of writing has become its own celebrity: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” From that sentence, knit into the reflective context of A Burst of Light, Lorde’s award-winning contemplation on the healthcare system and the cancer that had invaded her body, the concept of “self-care” was popularized and made real.

“We noticed that in the public discourse, particularly in media and social media, there are several Black feminist terms, ideas and practices floating around,” says Klingenberg, a curator of Black music and entertainment in the museum’s division of cultural and community life, in an interview after the series debuted earlier this year. “But they’re always disconnected from the Black feminist thinkers who created them, the context in which they were created, and in some instances, from the very meaning that the original creators were thinking of when they created them.”

Like many terms that originate in the canon of Black art and thought, self-care has been swallowed into a vortex of mainstream overuse and lack of attribution.

. . .

In 1977, the women of the Combahee River Collective released a groundbreaking statement “defining and clarifying” the politics of Black feminism. It was also arguably the first time that the phrase “identity politics” would appear, and Smith is credited with coining the term.“We were not saying that we were superior to any other groups of oppressed people,” says Smith in the podcast. “We were not being a vanguard. We did not think that we were the only people on Earth who were oppressed. We just wanted to assert that unlike the women’s movement and unlike the Black liberation movement at that time, that there was a particular set of situations, circumstances and experiences and oppressions that Black women experienced, and that we needed to deal with those. And that’s what we meant by identity politics.”

More at the link, including the podcasts.

Book Rec: Coming Out Under Fire, by Allan Bérubé

Occasionally I see some discourse on Tumblr from folks in the HBO War fandom or different historical/history adjacent fandoms about how there weren’t that many members of the queer community involved in WWII, and I’d really like to point them and everyone else with an interest in queer history to this wonderful book. Originally published in 1990, Coming Out Under Fire gets into all the different ways queer folks DID participate in the war. It’s from an American perspective, so if you’re looking for other Allied experiences, unfortunately there won’t be much here for you, but it’s exceptionally well researched, and crucially a lot of the content comes from interviews with surviving servicemembers. There’s also a documentary based on the book, which came out a few years later and includes video interviews with some of the folks included in the text.

One of Bérubé’s main points in his introduction – and for writing the book in the first place – is the American government, history textbooks, Hollywood, etc. is able to paint the WWII-era military as an almost entirely straight military force because many queer people who participated in the war effort were silenced during their lifetimes, and were unable or unwilling to reveal their true identities. Some of this was from societal pressure – the post war period saw a huge surge in homophobic rhetoric and persecution in the name of fighting Communism, not to mention the ever present heteronormative pressure to get married and have kids – but also because so many queer veterans died during the AIDS epidemic. Bérubé was inspired to preserve the voices of those who were still with us and shed a light on some of the folks we lost. (Note that this was also an intensely personal issue for Bérubé, who lost friends and his partner to AIDS and thus saw first hand how devastating this was to the community in terms of robbing us of our loved ones, friends, elders, and history itself.)

In the book, Bérubé makes the point over and over again that queer people were involved at basically every level in the American military during the war. There’s stories about guys lying when asked “Do you like girls?” during enlistment, lesbians in the Women’s Army Corps being brought to trial for fraternizing, drag shows in POW camps and in reserve, front line combat veterans discussing losing romantic partners to enemy fire or coming out to foxhole buddies, who were supportive allies rather than hateful. One of my favorite stories that’s always stuck out to me is a guy who came home and decided to come out to his elderly mother, who was fully accepting and supportive of her son’s sexuality. I see so many people speaking in absolutes that there’s NO WAY you could come out to your family and be accepted in the past, and while that was certainly true for so many people, it’s also not an absolute truth.

Please note I am NOT giving blanket permission to make assumptions about real-life people’s sexualities or identities, nor am I saying Band of Brothers fics where half the company is dating each other are historically accurate, but it’s really sad to see folks on here (unknowingly, hopefully) perpetuating the myth that there really weren’t that many queer folks in the military during WWII. We were there, we just couldn’t be out the way we might have liked to be. After the war, the Red Scare, societal pressure, and a literal epidemic silenced countless members of the community about their time in the service. There’s no way to know how many people who fought on Guadalcanal or worked at stateside bases or sorted mail in France were queer, but it’s a lot more than you were led to believe.

As a member of the community and a historian (brief resume: MA in Public History, BA in American History, have published stuff and created exhibits for dozens of museums), I just want to remind folks that we have always been here, and our lives weren’t always miserable and tragic when we came out to people or decided to live as authentically as we could get away with. It’s not completely historically inaccurate to write fic or original fiction where your queer characters can come out to their families and not be shunned, or live with their partners and not be immediately murdered. Being queer wasn’t invented at Stonewall.