would anyone be willing to give some perspective from a queer Jewish person? like how your relationships with God and with your queer identify have affected each other, or how accepted you feel by your religion?

It will never cease to amuse me that anti-Zionists are managing to promote Aliyah and Zionism better than Israel ever has or ever could.

Being asked by my therapist if I'm a Zionist after I opened up to her about my rapist having filmed it when he raped me when I was 5 has set me back to square one in recovery. Ma'am. Ma'am, I'm trying to talk to you about something that rewrote my personality, gave me PTSD, and has caused me to live my life in daily terror knowing this footage is out there, and you're not only tuning me out, THIS is what you're thinking about instead?!

That is disgusting behaviour and I hope that therapist loses their license. Absolutely unethical.

Also I'm so sorry that happened to you. I can't even begin to imagine how painful it must be to carry that trauma. I hope justice was done in a way or another, and I hope you can heal in the future, with a better therapist

one argument I keep coming across in relation to Israel is that "no one deserves an ethnostate" and, even ignoring my own discomfort at applying a white supremacist term to a Jewish state, it's an argument I hate for a few reasons:

It's wrong - Israel may be a Jewish state and thus built on Jewish traditions, culture and religion (but is that any different than Muslim nations like Pakistan, or even Western countries which have Christianity built into their foundations?), but not all Israelis are Jewish; there are Muslim Israelis and Buddhist Israelis and Christian Israelis

'ethnostate', by virtue of having been coined by white supremacists, bring to mind a swathe of white, US/European colonisers, and while many Israelis have European/USamerican ancestry, there are Israelis from North Africa and the Middle East and South Asia as well - many of whom came to Israel fleeing persecution in their own lands, which brings me to:

the argument is ignoring historical context; Israel is not the result (solely) of a European imperialist mindset - why do Jews, specifically, get a state of their own? Well, because historically, we have been kicked out or (attempted) ethnically cleansed from all other countries - the fear of pogroms, the anxiety of wondering when we'll have to flee again, is built into our culture, traditions, our DNA, and the only way to avoid a government that'll suddenly, from one day to the next, decide that it hates Jews and wants us dead, is to make our own country and our own government

and finally: it's a useless point to make. Whether you think Israel is a legitimate state or not doesn't actually matter or make any difference; the fact of the matter is that Israel is an internationally recognised state, and that's the fact we have to work off.

Does all of this mean Israel hasn't committed war crimes? No. Does this mean that Palestinians deserve to be murdered and driven from their homes? No.

But it does mean that, once again, leftists online need to come and join the rest of us in the real world - which includes nuance and historical context and other such complicated things - if they want to help foster real change.

If you can't just simply say "true, that was a bad thing with no possible justification" about anything "your side" does then I'm sorry but your opinions are worthless to me

🐾🐕Schnauzers🐕🐾

This has been a PSA.

Flash Comics #13 - “The Creeps” (1941)

written by John B. Wentworth art by Stan Aschmeier

vent post. There are two stories i was told in my teenage years that even before i had a real concept of trans issues made me uninterested in discussing the supposed sacredness and safety of separated sex-based spaces.

First, when i was like 13 or 14 my PE teacher told us about a time she went to a women's public restroom, some guy was hanging out outside the bathrooms, she didn't think anything of it, went to the bathroom, and he walked in after her and like, creeped on her over the top of the stall. She was ok, she wasn't telling us this to scare us, just telling us what to do in situations like that (and iirc she was telling the whole co-ed class this, not just girls, bc it's useful for everyone), but this taught me immediately and forever that there's nothing actually keeping these spaces separate really, that anyone can be a creep in any space, and that establishing a space like that as for women only isn't actually particularly useful for safety.

Second, when i was 16 i was at an anime convention, a friendly acquaintance of mine and i ended up in conversation outside, and he showed me his bare wrist and told me he'd been kicked out. A female friend of his had stepped in dog poop outside, and between that and the stress of the convention she'd had a bit of an emotional breakdown, so being her friend, he started comforting her and ushered her into the women's restroom so they could wash the poop off her shoe together. And because he was a man who went into the women's bathroom, he got kicked out, no matter that he was doing something that was actually beneficial to a woman. Punishing a woman's friend for supporting her was supposed to... protect her somehow? This made it clear to me that a no-exceptions rule separating the sexes like that wasn't actually inherently good for everyone.

And this isn't even getting into me as a child needing to accompany my younger sister to the restroom when we were out with just my dad because she had certain support needs past the age he felt comfortable bringing her into the men's room with him. And what if I'd been born a boy, or she'd been the first born? Who's helping her then?

And of course even putting all this aside, we should always prioritize compassion and support anyway. But i never even needed to meet a trans person to know that "keeping men out of women's bathrooms" is silly nonsense. But trans people also need to pee anyway and as humans they have that right, so leave them the fuck alone. your precious women's restroom is just a fucking room with a door, holy shit give it a fucking rest, if someone is attacking you in the bathroom that's bad and if someone is in there to pee that's good and it doesn't fucking matter what their junk is or was when they were born.

a woman could have done the exact same thing to my PE teacher and it would have also been bad no matter how "supposed" to be in the restroom she was, and no one should ever be punished for helping a crying friend wash their shoe.

Anyway i know I'm speaking to like-minded folks here, i just think about those two stories literally every time bathroom gender shit comes up and it pisses me off.

every day i wish ronald reagan had died in childbirth

Have you REALLY lost your scissors if you aren't walking around making scissor motions with your fingers in an attempt to lure them back out?

this was funnier in my head

Having a complicated relationship with your womenhood doesn't mean you get to appropriate trans womanhood. You will never understand the reality of being transfem. Idk how complicated your genderfuckery is, you aren't a trans women and never will be. The fact that you claim trans womanhood for yourself because you feel different from cis women is also messed up. We aren't a special gender freak version of women, we are women and we aren't your aesthetic

Trans womanhood is not some secret dianic cult of knowledge that you can only know if you were born with certain parts. That sounds pretty similar to what people say about womanhood in general. Don't be transphobic.

I'm transfemasc, not one or the other. Sorry that upsets you, but suck it up it's not about you