i'm so tired, honestly it's exhausting to see this weird constant infighting from everyone. It's like, trans women feel like their issues are not being listened to and taken seriously, trans men feel like their issues aren't listened to and taken seriously, non binary people, intersex people etc, which is in ALL cases, TRUE. but then we get into this is "I have it worse, no one can understand my struggle" feeling, and you get the pushing and the shoving and blame, getting hurt and then smacking the person next to you in the face because they were there.

I'm tired. No one is "Exempt" from bigotry. The reproductive rights, Healthcare, working, school, there is no case where we aren't all affected. No one is "talking over" anyone else by wanting their suffering to be acknowledged. There's no "one true oppressed group" and everyone else is pretenders. That stuff is reductive and only helps those who want to hurt us. those feelings make sense, we all want to be listened to and not talked over, but we continue to engage in oppression olympics, while our rights are being stripped from us and it's not helping. So I'm really tired.

In case no one got the memo, it's not queer people's responsibility to police the terms we call ourselves and the way we present to make ourselves more Acceptable and Understandable to straight cis people. If your problem with someone calling themselves a term they feel describes them or presenting in a certain way is "this gives straight people the wrong idea/makes us unacceptable to straight people" your problem is with queerphobes. I need you to understand that NO queer people are truly acceptable to queerphobes and that the only reason they may ACT accepting towards some and not others is because "acceptable" to a queerphobe means "presenting and acting in a way where I don't have to face and accept that this person is queer and I can pretend queerness isnt real" and it's conditional. It's always conditional. It's conditional upon you making yourself small and unobtrusive and not being visibly queer and not talking about your queerness and not using words that feel authentic to you even if straight people don't like them. This goes for many misguided allies as well who haven't done deeper work to examine their biases and prejudices. Be a winner and stop policing other queer people like that thinking you're doing any good at all. If you have leverage by being one of those "tentatively acceptable queers" maybe try using that to tell a straight person why their conditional acceptance isn't true allyship, provided you feel safe doing so. Otherwise, stop validating them more than your less "acceptable" siblings and move on.

My queers, we really need to put the "no men" thing away. Men are not inherently bad. There are queer men. There are questioning men. There's men that are just plain cool. Denying these men a space at our table is not helping - except the TERFs. I just came off the back of reading a transphobe gleeful rant about the need to have pride without men - They of course mean me. This kind of stuff is damaging to me and I really need us all to take a step back and maybe kill this "men dni, men not allowed" stuff. What you mean is "no men who are going to do mean stuff to me." And frankly those men won't give a shit about that kind of boundary.

But I promise you there's a fleet of good honest men who will see that and be sad they're not allowed in your version of queer spaces.

PATRIARCHY is what you hate. Dni Patriarchs.

In Defense of Shitty Queer Art

Queer art has a long history of being censored and sidelined. In 1895, Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray was used as evidence in the author’s sodomy trials. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the American Hays Code prohibited depictions of queerness in film, defining it as “sex perversion.” In 2020, the book Steven Universe: End of an Era by Chris McDonnell confirmed that Rebecca Sugar’s insistence on including a sapphic wedding in the show is what triggered its cancellation by Cartoon Network. According to the American Library Association, of the top ten most challenged books in 2023, seven were targeted for their queer content. Across time, place, and medium, queer art has been ruthlessly targeted by censors and protesters, and at times it seems there might be no end in sight.

So why, then, are queer spaces so viciously critical of queer art?

Name any piece of moderately-well-known queer media, and you can find immense, vitriolic discourse surrounding it. Audiences debate whether queer media is good representation, bad representation, or whether it’s otherwise too problematic to engage with. Artists are picked apart under a microscope to make sure their morals are pure enough and their identities queer enough. Every minor fault—real or perceived—is compiled in discourse dossiers and spread around online. Lines are drawn, and callout posts are made against those who get too close to “problematic art.”

Modern examples abound, such as the TV show Steven Universe, the video game Dream Daddy, or the webcomic Boyfriends, but it’s far from a new phenomenon. In his book Hi Honey, I’m Homo!, queer pop culture analyst Matt Baume writes about an example from the 1970s, where the ABC sitcom titled Soap was protested by homophobes and queer audiences alike—before a single episode of the show ever aired. Audiences didn’t wait to actually watch the show before passing judgment and writing protest letters.

After so many years starved for positive representation, it’s understandable for queer audiences to crave depictions where we’re treated well. It’s exhausting to only ever see the same tired gay tropes and subtext, and queer audiences deserve more. Yet the way to more, better, varied representation is not to insist on perfection. The pursuit of perfection is poison in art, and it’s no different when that art happens to be queer.

When the pool of queer art is so limited, it feels horrible when a piece of queer art doesn’t live up to expectations. Even if the representation is technically good, it’s disappointing to get excited for a queer story only for that story to underwhelm and frustrate you.

But the world needs that disappointing art. It needs mediocre art. It even needs the bad art. The world needs to reach a point where queer artists can fearlessly make a mess, because if queer artists can only strive for perfection, the less art they can make. They may eventually produce a masterpiece, but a single masterpiece is still a drop in the bucket compared to the oceans of censorship. The only way to drown out bigotry and offensive stereotypes created by bigots is to allow queer artists the ability to experiment, learn through making mistakes, and represent their queer truth even if it clashes with someone else’s.

If queer artists aren’t allowed to make garbage, we can never make those masterpieces everyone craves. If queer artists are terrified at all times that their art will be targeted both by bigots and their own queer communities, queer art cannot thrive.

Let queer artists make shitty art. Let allies to queer people try their hand at representation, even if they miss the mark. Let queer art be messy, and let the artists screw up without fear of overblown retribution.

It’s the only way we’ll ever get more queer art.

_

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but being genuine & not jokey for a second you Need to make yourself a safe person for transfems. every time you support the witch-hunt of a trans girl you are signaling to every other trans girl you know that you will ruin their life if they say something you don't like. you have to put aside kneejerk disgust reactions and simply block people if they post something that upsets you. this is not worth risking their safety

Out of Touch

I think it's also worth noting that in the US there has been a major push in schools to devalue & defund subjects that would help these kids develop critical thinking skills. If you don't know how to process information in an analytical way, you rely on your emotions and instincts -- which are not always correct in assessing the content. When school overworks these kids & tells them that art and English are a waste of their time and won't get them very far in life, it's easy to see how these kids will reject those subjects and embrace reactionism. They're genuinely exhausted from all the expectations put on them, which is not conducive to the "sit down and really mull it over" kind of work that critical thinking requires.

And I also 100% agree that kids are abused, exploited, and generally undervalued in our society. They are also taught that sex & expressing sexuality is one of the worst things they can do (whether directly from a parent or indirectly from the wider cultural attitude towards sex) and sexual abuse is often (as the person above said) the only abuse that gets validated by adults. So you get a whole group of kids who will police their own sexuality and don't know how to effectively question whether they have the full picture about those subjects. They are not taught to think for themselves. When someone else is found thinking for themselves and says something that seems alarming to these kids, the ones who have not learned to exercise critical thinking will react instead of consider, and are more likely to attempt ostracizing and shaming their peers. They reject media that seems problematic because they never learned how to analyze what's being said or how to engage with problematic themes in a critical way, or that doing so is a valuable practice to begin with.

It is, in part, adult society failing to teach our children the very basics of independence & free thought. By doing so, we create children who will grow up to be those same reactionary adults who don't foster critical thinking or free thought because they never learned how to do it either, and they don't see the problem in forcing everyone to prioritize their own comfort & worldview.

weird anti ideology finally leaking out into the mainstream

I think a lot of like discourse of what to focus on with this or that thing gets the end goal and things to ease newcomers into your ideas confused with each other.

Like yes perhaps the end goal is to get UBI going but if your Uncle Jerry is currently struggling with the concept of taxes maybe get him to understand the cost of road maintenance first before you start trying to get him onboard with free preschool.

Also just because someone is explaining the concept of taxes to Uncle Jerry doesn’t mean they don’t believe in free childcare.

Okay, but this will probably genuinely help! There's no way to know what someone is thinking or feeling about you unless they tell you about it. If you're going to assume something about your friends or the people around you anyway, you might as well assume they're thinking positive or neutral things about you until proven otherwise. It is a lot easier on your mental health to stop assuming that everyone hates you. And if your brain is filled with anxiety & telling you that everyone hates you & they're just not telling you, it's easier to combat that by reminding yourself that it's their job to communicate their problems to you -- not your job to read their minds and fix problems you have no details about.

Not only does this turn the focus towards the importance of open communication in your relationships, but it also paints the people who love you in a gentler light. You are more likely to seek help or affirmation or just general support from people when you stop labeling all of them as ticking time bombs waiting to turn on you at any moment. That, in turn, builds trust & intimacy, and in time it's possible that your subconscious will rewire itself to have a softer reaction. (Not guaranteed, but possible.)

Anyway, good on you, OP!

My subconscious reads literally every reaction that people have to me as negative somehow even if they act happy to see me so I’ve just had to make the conscious decision that if someone doesn’t give me a concrete reason to assume they hate me then I won’t assume that they hate me. If they want me to piss off and don’t tell me to piss off that’s their problem.

Everyone remember to wear masks & ball caps to bamboozle the feds!

Really feel bad for anyone who has to investigate protesters this time of the year. The sun is finally coming out so everybody's walking or taking public transit, but it's still chilly out and there's all kinds of colds going around so a lot of folks are wearing medical masks and ball caps even if they aren't up to anything. Wild times

This was me listening to Willie Nelson for the first time. I was like, "Was anyone gonna tell me this guy is like a legend?????" lol

This is how it feels to read a classic that everyone in the world has already read and loves

I wonder if work just.. got harder in the 2000s, comparatively.