As a reminder that good exists out there, a coworker recently confessed to me that he found out his child is questioning their identity (kid's gender redacted for this post). The kid is keeping it from him, so he can't say anything to them or show that he knows, but he's doing his best to get mentally prepared and educated so that he'll be ready whenever his kid does feel comfortable enough come to him.

For context, this guy is a big, bulky middle aged dude who loves sports and typical outdoor "manly" activities. As his coworker and friend, I know he's a kind and sweet teddy bear of a person, but his kid probably views him as a stern, authoritarian figure, the way most teenagers view their parents. His family lives in a conservative area, so I'm sure between that, their dad's looks and interests, and the fact that their dad is a Figure of Authority, the kid is worried that they won't be accepted.

But you know what? When he found out about his kid, the first thing he did was reach out to his closest queer friend and ask for resources for parents of questioning children. His biggest fears are that his kid will be bullied or discriminated against and won't feel comfortable enough to be themself. His second action was to find himself a mentor in another parent who went the same situation (kid coming out in a conservative town). The other person is preparing him for some of the struggles his kid may face and the fights he may need to take on as a parent to make sure his kid is safe and treated well.

Something I want to emphasize for people focused on language as the primary method of allyship is that when we spoke, he used some outdated terms and thoughts about gender and sexuality. That does not make him bad. These were the terms and thinking used about questioning teenagers when he was growing up and he never needed to learn more current ones. But now that he does have that need, he's throwing himself in head first because that's his kid and he's darn well going to make sure that his kid feels welcomed and has a safe place to be themselves even if they never come out to him.

Potentially hot take but I find the mandatory disclosure of pronouns increasingly prevalent in academic and some professional settings to be dystopic as hell, not cause "pronouns cringe" but because the mandatory reporting of your personal gender identity to a group of total strangers over and over again is fucking weird and invasive

Exactly fucking this. What happens to trans people who are not publicly out when they have to repeat pronouns that misgender them over and over again? It probably doesn't feel fucking great.

LGBTQ people, especially Western LGBTQ people who seem to have forgotten homo/transphobia exist outside of online discourse, really fucking need to reacquaint themselves with the idea that someone's relationship with their gender and/or sexuality is their business and absolutely no one else's. You do not owe disclosure of those identities to anyone aside from yourself (indeed you don't even need to form an identity around it if you don't want to or have a different way of experiencing such things). Learn to leave people tf alone.

So I’m a teacher, and all the policies I’ve adopted in my classroom came from our gay straight alliance club presented to us by transgender students because they wanted to.

I do ask on the first day for their roster name, their preferred name they want me to call them in class, and what pronouns they want me to use in class. I do not ever ask what their pronouns actually are. They give me this info on an index card, and not by speaking in front of the whole class.

I also have a roster that I keep on my desk that has this information for substitutes so that they call roll using preferred names and not roster names that often still dead names (though this has improved in the last year. We now will edit to a chosen name without a legal change of name).

I suppose this is a situation where I am never going to make everyone happy, where not every trans experience is going to be the same and different trans individuals will have different preferences on being asked or not. And while the nuance of asking “what do you want me to use?” Rather than “what are your pronouns?” Might not yet be there, I thought the point of this was to make asking everyone for pronouns constantly is to make it normal to ask for pronouns, to not assume that someone is as they are presenting. Is that not more inclusive??

If I don’t ask what they want me to use, aren’t I going to misgender them constantly??

Genuinely wanting to be an ally. Tell me how.

Steven Universe: Eh, I don't really feel like saying "girlfriend" or "wife". Maybe they're together. They have a special connection...

(gets violently shoved aside)

The Loud House/Craig of the Creek/The Owl House: Pfft, amateur. "My GIRLFRIEND Sam and I..." "I'm texting my GIRLFRIEND, mind your business." "Luz's new GF showed her..."

Can we not do this thing? Do you realize that Rebecca had to fight for what we got with Rupphire and literally risked her job? and Pearl and Rose. Like, there is no need to knock other shows down because of Lumity.

These kids today, I tell you what. In my day you had to bury your girlfriends under subtext and then end the series when the truth was revealed.

Risked her job, hell, it's an open secret now that the Rupphire wedding (which, may I remind folks, was the first queer wedding in a kids' cartoon, which is a BIG DEAL) is why everything about the rest of the series felt rushed. They had to scramble to tell the rest of the story because they took a gamble and the network retaliated by shortening their production time.

Rebecca Sugar and the crewniverse risked the entire show getting flat-out cancelled in order to show that wedding, only for people to say it "wasn't progressive enough" and was "giving in to stereotypes" to put Ruby in a wedding dress. Never mind that Ruby kept getting dubbed over as a guy in localization, Sapphire was unmistakably feminine in every version, and putting Ruby in the dress was a flagrant way to say, "fuck you, you can't pretend this is a straight couple; this is a queer couple and a queer wedding."

Dana Terrace has said that The Owl House only exists with its intended queerness because of what Rebecca Sugar and her team accomplished with Steven Universe. Hell, there are multiple members of the Steven Universe team who went on to work on the other shows mentioned in the OP--Steven Sugar, for example, who is Rebecca Sugar's brother and inspiration for SU in the first place (as well a background artist on the show), is currently an artist on The Owl House. There are people who got their start on Steven Universe who now only have the opportunity to tell more queer stories because of Steven Universe's success.

I'm not even 30 years old yet and I'm still old enough to remember when being gay was fully illegal in the United States. Not gay marriage, but literally just BEING GAY. It wasn't that long ago, and the fact that today in 2021 I can turn on the TV and watch gay cartoons intended for children? I never thought I'd see it. Fucking ever.

So let's stop pitting queer creators and media against each other, shall we?

So often older shows that seem pitifully lackluster by today's audience's standards were hard-fought, BIG-ASS DEALS in their contemporary context. (And for the record, calling SU or something like Korra 'older' to me feels bizarre af, I'm 28, this is all new to me in some ways. This is all extraordinary and the opposite of lackluster.) What you're seeing is an extraordinary amount of progress over the last mere ten years. Don't knock it.

Not to mention, that at this point we can say The Owl House suffered the same fate. They got cancelled and had to rush to planned ending to their show as well.

I'm not saying everyone has to love every single piece of queer media, and I'm not saying that queer media is immune to problems, but I am saying that it concerns me how many queer people my age and younger seem so gleefully willing to rip queer media to shreds over the smallest provocation.

Y'all put off the vibe that you'd willingly hand things over to the Production Code office to be destroyed for their portrayal of "immoral love" and "sex perversion."

Will Hays and Joseph Breen would have loved you. The Production Code Administration and MPPDA would have been overjoyed at your willingness to feed your own to the wolves in the name of Moral Purity.

I see "Catradora is toxic" and "Ed/Stede is problematic" and "First Kill was dumb" and "Sense8 was cringey"

and I wonder if you know how impossible every single piece of modern queer media would have been just twenty-five years ago.

How many of them almost didn't happen even now.

How many people want it all purged from existence and memory.

How many people want us all dead, gone, forgotten, never able to make art or anything else ever again.

I wonder how you can take so much for granted.

Because they can. They don't remember what it was like.

To a certain extent, it makes me happy that "kids these days" have the ability and capacity to act like this, because they've never known what we knew when we were young. Like, congrats! We did it! We made enough progress that this generation doesn't know what we went through and can't really appreciate it!

But then the reality of it is that this fight isn't over, and the younger generation don't think the fight is worth having for "imperfect" media, or that it's over and won.

And of course that's not true.

I suppose the silver lining is that it makes me infinitely more grateful to every single queer adult who was in my life when I was little, and to every queer adultier-adult in my life now.

Things my brother has said to me since I’ve come out

Bro: You can’t say you’re pan if you’ve only dated cis-boys Jess..

Me: Then you can’t say you’re straight since you’ve never had a girlfriend

Bro: touche…

____________________________________________________________

Bro: so you like girls?

Me: yep

Bro: so youre gonna get a girlfriend?

Me: maybe

Bro: NOW I GOTTA COMPETE AGAINST YOU TOO?? 

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Bro: wanna bet on who kisses a girl first?

Me: sure… $10?

Bro: okay

Me: sweet…cough up the money because i already kissed three

Bro: WHAT?? WHO?? you whore…No but seriously who because we only have like 2 lesbians in our school….

____________________________________________________________

Bro: I SWEAR TO GOD IF I HEAR ONE MORE PUN ABOUT YOU AND KITCHENWEAR IM KILLING YOU

____________________________________________________________

Brothers friend: so your sister is pan?

Bro: yeah?

Friend: what’s that?

Bro: basically she’ll date anyone

Friend: think she’ll date me?

Bro: ew no, dude she has standered still..

____________________________________________________________

Bro: so…how was narnia?

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Mother: i dont want you going to (insert friend)’s house because you’re pan and they are too

Bro: shes 18 mom AND you had no problem with it before jess was out

Mother: yeah but-

Bro: and they’re both girls so its not like even if something DID happen she wouldn’t get pregnant or anything

Mother: yeah but-

Bro: just let her hang out with the one friend she still has

____________________________________________________________

Bro: *is complaning about something* Thats so ga- OH MY GOD IM SO SORRY IT SLIPPED

____________________________________________________________

Bro: *shows me a picture of a girl* do you think shes hot?

Me: ew no

Bro: I AM TRYING TO GET YOU A GIRLFRIEND STOP BEING PICKY WOMAN WE LIVE IN THE MIDDLE OF NO WHERE THERE ARENT THAT MANY OPTIONS 

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Me: *is complaining to my brother about this dude on campus* -anyways hes so not my type

Mother: but youre pan and ‘youre attracted to everyone regardless of gender’ so you dont have a type

Bro: thats like saying because i’m straight i like every girl mom…she can be pan and have types you limp lettuce

____________________________________________________________

Bro: do you think grandma will freak out when she finds out you’re queer?

Me: hopefully

Bro: sweet…..can i tell her??

Me: no?

Bro: dammit…

____________________________________________________________

Bro: *is playing COD online in his room* Guys seriously stop saying the F slur

Bro: Seriously i dont care about your kill streak, i will shoot you

Bro: NO SCOPE! I warned you!

____________________________________________________________

Bro: you know what my favorite part of you being pan is?

Me: what?

Bro: you’re no longer grandmas favorite…now i get all the money/food

____________________________________________________________

Bro: aw fuck

Me: what?

Bro: what if you get a girlfriend one day and she breaks your heart? i can’t punch a girl! 

Me: no thats okay-

Bro: HOW WILL I DEFEND YOUR HONOR???

This is so sweet actually

i just made bird noises

i want a brother holy dang

So how was Narnia is the only appropriate way to respond when someone u love comes out the closet lol

@octoberasters