INFJ, Queer, Non-binary (pronouns = ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), Autistic, writer, painter, former drag king. I consume entirely too much media. TV, books, movies, podcasts, fanfic, comics, web series, plays (musical & non), etc.
Doing research for my top surgery & luckily there are two world renowned surgeons in my area, but unluckily neither of them accept my insurance. So now I just have to choose between them & fund raise, cause I definitely can’t afford this on my own.
9 days of Sense8 Day 9: #sense8appreciationday (Cluster day) - “Who I am is exactly the same as who you are. Not better than. Not less than. Because there is no one who has been or will ever be exactly the same as either you or me.”
can we like…get rid of the so-called leather and rubber “pride flags” ? it’s honestly ridiculous and offensive to the lgbtq community. those aren’t pride flags.
The leather pride flag is the second oldest pride flag. It has been at almost every single US pride parade and protest in history.
It’s older then you are, it’s older then I am. The leather community is responsible for pride. Leather daddies were the ones chasing away cops when they tried to arrest us for being queer in public back when Pride Parades were illegal in the US. They are still the ones chasing away cops and corporations from smaller pride events and those that aren’t sanctioned by Wells Fargo. The leather community is essential to the queer community and has a long and rich history.
Please fuck off if you’re not going to learn the actual history of pride.
And don’t fucking out your hate in our tags, asshole.
The leather pride flag represents an expression of self which is inherently queer, and a community which has been around for generations. It is not offensive to the LGBT+ community in any way. I have seen cis gay and bisexual men standing shoulder-to-shoulder with trans men, all of them united by their leather community roots. The leather community is more diverse and nuanced than you perhaps know, but that is no reason for you to shit on a community you don’t understand.
Here is a photograph from 1998, displaying the leather pride flag, the bear gay pride flag, and the rainbow flag. This is our history.
A photograph from 1988: Tony Deblase, the creator of the leather pride flag, and a gay man, embracing a fellow member of the leather community. Over his shoulder is Judy Tallwing McCarthy, a Native American woman who was part of the leather community from 1959. She co-founded the first lesbian BDSM group in Portland, along with her partner, Sashie Hyatt.
Just because you don’t know the history, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Be humble, and always assume you have more to learn. Hatred, and outright dismissal of communities you know nothing about, is the most aggressively anti-LGBT thing I can imagine.
The leather community has always included trans people, lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals. The leather community is global and nuanced. The leather community is where many of us encounter our found families, and our lovers. For you to dismiss that is cold-hearted and ignorant. Just because queer sex is involved, doesn’t make the community dirty or bad.
This is about how you carried my bag off the bus yesterday. This is about how… When we go to the movies and you go and you buy a popcorn you always make sure you bring back a napkin so I don’t wipe all the grease on my jeans. And this is about how just last week when we were at miniature golf you took all of the shots first so I would know the correct path. You taught me how to drive. And last year at prom… You knew that the bracelet I was wearing was my mom’s. You kissed me first, sweetheart. The second time… You counted to ten before doing it again just in case I wanted to stop you. You bought me a wall. We were alone on a boat for three months and you understood without a word why I wasn’t ready. Do you have to ask me now why I am? Pace. I’m gonna count to ten… And then I’m going to start kissing you. If you don’t want me to… Then you’re just gonna have to stop me. Ten, my love.
A lot of people ask me what my biggest fear is, or what scares me most. And I know they expect an answer like heights, or closed spaces, or people dressed like animals, but how do I tell them that when I was 17 I took a class called Relationships For Life and I learned that most people fall out of love for the same reasons they fell in it. That their lover’s once endearing stubbornness has now become refusal to compromise and their one track mind is now immaturity and their bad habits that you once adored is now money down the drain. Their spontaneity becomes reckless and irresponsible and their feet up on your dash is no longer sexy, just another distraction in your busy life.
Nothing saddens and scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes.
this fucks me up every single time
I never expected this to be my most popular poem out of the hundreds I’ve written. I was extremely bitter and sad when I wrote this and I left out the most beautiful part of that class.
After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.
She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.
Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.
The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.
The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.
Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.
I no longer fear the day someone who swore I was their universe can no longer see the stars in my eyes as long as they still choose to look until they find them again.
This is so fucking important and I think it’s something I needed right now
TOP TEN TELEVISION SHOWS (as voted by my followers)
1. Derry Girls (2018- ) “It doesn’t matter that you’ve got that stupid accent, or that your bits are different to my bits, because being a Derry Girl, well, it’s a fucking state of mind.”
my personal curse is the knowledge that I function best with rigid structure and strict routine but am almost totally incapable of independently establishing or maintaining that structure and routine
Don’t forget this special feature: at the same time hating when people tell you what to do
“A lot of native speakers are happy that English has become the world’s
global language. They feel they don’t have to spend time learning
another language,” says Chong.
“But… often you have a boardroom full of
people from different countries communicating in English and all
understanding each other and then suddenly the American or Brit walks
into the room and nobody can understand them.”
The non-native speakers, it turns out, speak more purposefully and
carefully, typical of someone speaking a second or third language.
Anglophones, on the other hand, often talk too fast for others to
follow, and use jokes, slang and references specific to their own
culture, says Chong. In emails, they use baffling abbreviations such as
‘OOO’, instead of simply saying that they will be out of the office.
“The native English speaker… is the only one who might not feel the need to accommodate or adapt to the others,” she adds.
I’ve been thinking about this post all day, and the article glosses over one important detail. All of the “native English speakers” the article mentions belong to the same niche demographic: white collar/corporate professionals
English corporate speak is it’s own fucked up dialect.
It’s so incomprehensible and exclusionary that even a native English speaker with a master’s degree in English will have difficulty parsing it. Trust me when I say that nobody who isn’t a business major knows what the fuck “synergy” means.
And the jargon’s just half the problem. The other half is the gross overuse of hobby-specific expressions and analogies.
Go to most corporate offices and you’ll be bombarded with sports analogies that only make sense to someone who spends all their free time watching ESPN.
I tracked down this quote I read in a tumblr post years ago:
“I remember working with a law school in which white men heavily dominated the faculty. They used lots of sports metaphors (doing an end run, Monday morning quarterbacking, and so on), with legal jargon thrown in for good measure. I suggested that this was not a particularly welcoming trait in their school, that in fact it was sexist, but they paid little attention. I made my point by speaking for about five minutes in dressmaking terms: putting a dart in here, a gusset there, cutting the budget on the bias so it would be more flexible, using a peplum to hide a course that might be controversial. The women in the room laughed; the men did not find it humorous….Language is power, make no mistake about it. It is used to include and exclude and to keep people and systems in their places.”
- Frances E. Kendall, Understanding White Privilege
My point is,
This kind of poor communication probably shouldn’t be blamed on monolingualism alone. It’s most certainly made worse by an exclusionary and elitist work culture.
You’ll probably encounter far fewer communication issues talking to a cashier at a tourist trap than you will talking to a lawyer or a stockbroker.
I think the above reblog makes a really valuable point, but also misses something that the rest of the world experience when navigating international spaces.
If you grow up in a country where English isn’t the native language, you’ll probably have grown up being told your entire life that if you want to amount to anything, you’ll have to learn English. This is true for politics, trade, business, aid, and increasingly, even hospitality and costumer service. English is the lingua franca, and there’s a lot of pressure to be able to communicate as clearly and fluently as possible.
And then some anglophone walks in and speaking without even bothering to sound professional. In most cases, they don’t even seem to be aware of this massive access barrier the rest of the world experiences, because to them it just straight up doesn’t exist
You might be surprised to learn that it’s not just non-native English speakers who spend their whole lives being told that they will never be successful if they don’t learn proper English.
Black Americans who grow up speaking African American Vernacular English are also told, their whole lives, that the English they speak is “bad” and “inferior” and “nonsensical” and that they will never be successful if they can’t learn to speak “proper” English.
Scotland has spent many years fighting to have the Scots language recognized as a language, instead of being looked down upon as an “inferior” and “uneducated” and “low” form of English.
Caribbean native English speakers like my parents also grow up being told, even though they speak English from birth, that their English is “bad” and that they must learn “good” English in order to be successful.
.
I understand, as a native English speaker, that being a native English speaker is a privilege.
But I also understand more about your non-native experience than you probably realize.
I’m a 2nd generation immigrant. My parents grew up in the Caribbean, speaking Trinidadian English. I was teased for having an accent when I was in kindergarten. An adult once told me that I sounded like I was “fresh off the boat.”
Even though English was the only language I’d ever known, my English was still “wrong.” I was still told that I needed to learn “proper” English. I was still forced to assimilate. By second grade, Trinidadian slang was eliminated from my lexicon, my Trinidadian grammar was “corrected,” and my Trinidadian accent was completely gone.
.
It was not my intention to deny that native English speakers are privileged, but simply point out that the original article downplays the role class privilege plays in this issue.
And I feel like the above reply similarly tries to downplay the role class privilege plays in this issue.
It’s true that native English speakers can’t really understand how English is weaponized against non-native English speakers.
But at the very same time, non-native English speakers may never fully understand how English is weaponized against “low class” English speakers who grow up speaking “bad” English in the “wrong” English dialect.
deepfriedfuckpotato-deactivated asked: I get that you're young, but queer isn't a slur and don't reblog my damn posts with "q slur", please. My identity is not a slur. Thinking queer is a slur is ahistoric bullshit.
Lmfao what the fuck are you on?? Q*eer was originally used to refer to trans and sga people BY CISHETS to refer to us as abnormal and wrong. It’s a fucking slur. If you choose to use a slur as your only personal identifier then yes, your identity is a God damn slur. This is so disrespectful to every lgbt person with trauma surrounding that word, and you’re the one who’s being ahistorical. Asshole.
I’m on education that came from somewhere other than tumblr, my dude.
We’ve been calling ourselves queer since before WWII. It was not originally used “by cishets”. It was used by us. To describe us. Interchangeably with gay, which was used by all genders.
Ten years before you were born, Queer Nation was fighting for rights you now enjoy, marching in the streets. Queer Nation was founded by members of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an organization for AIDS advocacy, because we were literally dying in the streets. Which is where die-ins came from, by the way - during the AIDS crisis when hospitals wouldn’t touch us with a ten foot pole, people protested by literally dying in a place inconvenient for the powers that be.
Whoever “taught” you that queer is a slur and always has been lied to you.
We’re still here, we’re still queer, go educate yourself.
If you can’t give me sources on q*eer being used by lgbt people BEFORE they reclaimed it from cishets using it as a slur i really don’t care what you have to say
