Okay in the midst of this I do wanna say that this absolutely WILL get Trump even MORE support.

So, here's what you're gonna do, okay:

GO. FUCKING. VOTE.

Source

Source

A comic collab I made with my non-binary transmasc friend LM about our experiences feeling at home in our bodies 🪷

Check out more from my amazingly talented friend LM on Instagram:

https://instagram.com/lmperttula_design?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

In Full Swing: A comic about Spider-Gwen’s past inspired by Across the Spider Verse 🏳️‍⚧️ (⚠️Spoilers!⚠️)

You know, if we DO make contact with aliens within the next hundred years-ish, enough people are going to give the Vulcan salute to the first alien they see in real life (whether out of quivering excitement, lol memeitude, or sheer awkward, panicked grasping for the one prominent alien greeting nested in the social conscious) that there's a solid chance that it becomes a thing we're known for as humans.

Live Long and Prosper, my friends.

I know this was meant as a joke, but it reminds me of my one trip to Japan. I crammed just enough Japanese language to be polite and apologize, which had the side effect of making the locals think I could actually hold conversations. And every I hit a word or phrase I didn’t know, without missing a beat, my brain would drop in the appropriate chunk from Spanish or German.

It was incredibly embarrassing, but a neat example of how non-sensibly the brain tries to adapt. So I totally believe humans would, without even thinking, try to be friendly by dropping in the one alien greeting we know.

We have Fantasy AGE 2nd Edition in booth 903. This is not a drill. Fantasy AGE has arrived! #originsgamefair2023 #fantasyAGE #greenroninpublishing

Two More Stalkers

So I’m drafting this post on October 19, 2022, hoping that I won’t have to use it, but getting it set up as a contingency. Just in case.

Lots of screenshots under the cut, but TL;DR:

I have two stalkers who feel entitled to my work and writing, and have been stalking me because I didn’t write their historical blorbos to their personal satisfaction and because I haven’t written queer characters to their exacting specifications (specifically, they want what amount to Gold Star Lesbians with modern-style adopted children). In the course of their stalking, they have made a hate-blog specifically to target me with insults, and when that failed to get a response, escalated to making a new AO3 account specifically to write hatefic of my work and “gift” it to me.

If you see this post having gone live, I ask you to please review it and reblog it, because I am preparing this contingency in case they escalate to the point of trying to publicly defame me, and if I’ve hit “post”, that means they’re actively trying to get people to hate me.

So, without further ado…

Infighting only helps our oppressors.

Infighting only helps our oppressors.

Infighting only helps our oppressors.

Infighting only helps our oppressors.

Infighting only helps our oppressors.

You don't have to understand someone completely to respect them and fight for their right to exist.

!!!

a friend of mine has been saying "de-escalate all conflict that is not with the enemy."

we have real, life-threatening forces to fight back against.

Some folks would prefer that I keep politics OUT of my comic strip, but… uh… it’s a comic about my life as a transgender woman, and it’s KINDA hard to not be a smidge political when one party keeps pushing and passing laws that make it a crime for me to exist.  So, sorry if you feel this is unfair, but it feels pretty frickin’ unfair to be labeled a literal criminal for existing. 

coming fall 1991 to abc family

Fun fact: Not only did they get Jeffrey Combs to reprise his role voicing “Herbie,” this animated series was a young Gillian Anderson’s first role!

Just thinking about how republicans are going after normie sex shit like "internet porn" and "dildos" now

we fucking told y'all

to be clear: the right views any sex that isn't purely procreative as deviant. it's not just kink, or queer sex they find abhorrent. And they genuinely believe that the better educated you are about sex in general, including about gender shit, the more deviant you are. they're legitimately trying to claw everyone down to hell with them.

Now? Before 2003 it was legit technically illegal in some states for even straight couples to have oral or anal sex, and there are still laws in some states restricting how many dildos you can own etc.

I don't really know what the goal is with putting a numerical limit on dildos, but with republicans the answer is usually "There isn't one. Die."

This is your periodic reminder that it is currently right now illegal in the united states to own porn that the average person in your community would be offended by. That's the legal definition of obscenity (a piece of media that 1. Exists to turn people on 2. has no other "redeeming" purpose and 3. would be offensive to most people in your jurisdiction) and you can theoretically be arrested and go to jail for owning "obscene" media or giving it to other people.

"But that's ridiculous," you say, "porn that the average taxpayer would think was ~offensive~ is absolutely fuckin' everywhere, on the internet and in real life, and nobody gets in trouble for it." And you'd be right about that. Realistically, this is a law that cannot be enforced: it is way too easy to break, way too hard to track, and way too many people are interested in breaking it.

Same with the pre-Lawrence v. Texas laws against "sodomy" that headspace-hotel is talking about. Yeah, it was illegal to give a blowjob in the privacy of your own home. But of course most people who like blowjobs never even thought twice about those laws, because it's usually pretty easy to Not tell a cop what you do in the privacy of your bedroom with your spouse.

"So if laws like this don't actually stop people from doing whatever sexual things they want to do, why are you concerned about it? You just said these laws don't hurt anybody, right?" Here's the thing. The purpose of laws like this is to create an atmosphere where you can get away with doing ""deviant"" things... if you hide it from polite society, if you keep it secret, if you know your place.

What you can't do is go out in public and say that actually gay people can have happy relationships, or that masturbating sometimes doesn't make you a depraved sex addict, or that it's okay to want to enjoy having sex and not just do it as your Duty To Your Husband.

You can get away with doing what you want in private if you never challenge the dominant cultural message that what you're doing is gross and immoral and people who do it are disgusting freaks. If you dare to speak up and point out that your ""shameful secret"" is actually normal, off you go to jail.

That's the purpose of laws like this. To make it impossible to challenge the rhetorical stranglehold of conservative christianity on society. To shift the Overton window once and for all to the right. And that's why we need to fight laws like this with all our strength, every time the right tries to push them forward, even when the specifics are stuff like "you can't own more than five dildoes" that might seem like a silly thing to go to war over. It's not about the specifics. It's about limiting everyone's speech to things a conservative preacher would say from the pulpit.

The other thing laws like this are good for is giving the police excuses

Younger Americans NEED to understand why Lawrence vs Texas went to the Supreme Court.

In 2003, police raided the private home of two gay men and charged them with sodomy. I cannot emphasize enough that THEY WERE NOT CURRENTLY HAVING SEX AT ALL when the police raided them. But the cops had “probable cause” to believe that they had, at some point, had non-procreative sex, which was illegal under Texas’s sodomy law, so they were charged with a crime.

Ultimately, the SCOTUS ruled that sodomy laws are unconstitutional because US citizens have a right to privacy: what consenting adults do in their own homes is their own business.

What you need to know is that in four states, including Texas and. Missouri, sodomy laws are still on the books. That means that if SCOTUS strikes down Lawrence vs Texas, these laws immediately go back into effect, and more states can add their own.

What would that look like?

If you’re on Tinder and your profile says you’re gay or bi, the police can subpoena your profile and use it to arrest you.

If you’re on Scruff or Grindr, the police can subpoena your location data and messages and use them to track down and arrest you and all your hookups.

If you’re in a same-sex marriage, the police can subpoena a list of same-sex marriage certificates and arrest every single couple—even if they’re widowed or divorced.

If your school has an LGBTQ club, the police can subpoena a list of members and arrest kids & college students.

They could subpoena data from FetLife and Facebook and Twitter and, yes, if they thought to do so, Tumblr. Rainbow flag in your profile? They’re drawing up charges.

And all of these people getting arrested and charged with sodomy, when convicted, will not only have their lives ruined by jail time, but will also likely be labeled sex offenders for the rest of their lives.

This is not ancient history. This was not “back in the day.” I WAS IN COLLEGE WHEN THIS HAPPENED.

And the Republicans are frothing at the fucking mouth to bring these horrors back.

I cannot overemphasize how clearly laws like this were used as an excuse to target people within my own lifetime. If you hide your “shameful” life away and never mention being gay or trans and never act too gay or trans, well maybe you’ll be fine. But you piss off the wrong person or get uppity or just act too sassy, well then the cops might get involved.

FLORIDA HRT CRISIS: SB 254, effective May 17 2023, banned nearly all new HRT prescriptions and refills of existing prescriptions for trans adults, for up to 6 more weeks or until “emergency” state-mandated consent forms are published by the Boards of Medicine.

Trans care bans were never about “protecting children” — they were about making all trans existence completely impossible. See for yourself.

(Full quality version)

Please share to help Florida's trans community survive SB 254!

divide and conquer

One time I heard a dude online compare new and obscure LGBT terminology to newspeak. This I think is one of the biggest examples I have seen of people with their whole chest ignoring the basic themes of 1984.

In 1984 the whole point of newspeak was that it shrinks. Ideas that could once be communicated now cannot. Everything is simplified as much as possible. You cannot explain complicated ideas of freedom or equality because the words no longer exist, or they don’t mean what they once did.

More specifically, there is canonically no word for “gay” in 1984. There are only two words for the entire spectrum of sexuality. “goodsex” and “sexcrime”. If you’re gay it’s the exact same as being a pedophile. And those are is the exact same as cheating on your wife, which is the exact same daring to fuck your wife just because you feel like it. Which is no different than literally any sex act that might offend big brother.

Do you see what’s happening? In 1984 can no longer ask your wife to peg you or something because the word for pegging is the exact same word for pedophile. And you can’t come out as gay because all you can say is that you did a criminal sex act, which means you cannot make a case for your rights either.

Inventing made up words to describe obscure things that previously lacked words would literally be a perfect remedy to newspeak. This language would counter every barrier to communicating the necessary concepts. Because it’s what literally every normal non-dystopian language does.

Keep this in mind especially in regards to what's happening in Florida right now. They associate LGBT+ content with grooming, define it as pedophilia or child abuse or sexual crimes or etc. Then they pass laws calling for sex offenders to be executed. Bigots or morons claim "Oh, why are you against these anti-child abuse laws?!" Because the state is trying to redefine LGBT+ activity and individuals as being the same as child abuse. For all the bluster and anger over "Grrr, words don't mean anything anymore! These terms I grew up with don't matter anymore!" the truth is THEY are the ones trying to limits what words mean because they want to associate certain groups of people with evil people to make more innocent/ignorant individuals be okay with hurting those groups of people.

In linguistics, we have a concept called The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The basics of this concept are some degree of "If you don't have a word for it, you can't conceive of it."

Now, there are several degrees of this. The conception above is the strictest example of it, which is generally not accepted among linguists. A looser definition might be something like "It's much, much harder to talk about concepts you don't have words for." (For example, people who speak a language with more color words distinguish colors more quickly/easily than those who speak words with fewer color words).

Newspeak is weaponized Sapir-Whorf. To purposely restrict vocabulary to eliminate any thoughts of rebellion.

As pointed out above, progressives have been consistently adding vocabulary to the world, to better voice the thoughts and feelings of the oppressed and non-mainstream.