I, too, wocka wocka

i had a meet n greet with the anaesthesiologist for my top surgery and he said it’s his favourite procedure to work on because everyone who wants it is just so truly happy to be there, and i can’t stop thinking about this career that is 99% attending to various sadnesses miseries and woes and 1% having funny little dudes in dangerfield buttonups throwing themselves on the operating table like YEEHAW LET’S GOOOO

as the anesthesiologist was wheeling me into the OR, i grabbed the nurse’s hand as we passed her, and i said, “I’LL BE RIGHT BACK, I’VE GOT TO GET SOMETHING OFF MY CHEST.”

my journey to the OR was temporarily delayed because said anesthesiologist was bent at the waist, in hysterics, and took several minutes to collect himself.

when my old professor wrote FTM in giant letters on the board and pointed at it dramatically like "this means everything in economics" and I made eye contact with my one guy friend who was shaking and everybody else was sitting there stunned/confused for a bit until he said "follow the money"

much better simplified version of that long ass post i made a while ago that people got angry over

[Text: LGBT infighting mfs on this app (tiktok) when they learn in real life lesbians and bisexual women are smoking weed together and not having slur discourse. /end text.]

Tag urself I'm Tiddy Skittles

Guys I found the FUCKING article have it

Ashley, F. (2019). Surgical informed consent and recognizing perioperative duty to disclose in transgender health care. McGill Journal of Law and Health, 13(1), 73-116

The author is transfeminine themselves and this bit was in a FOOTNOTE. They had NO OBLIGATION to give this information and they are the funniest person on this fucking planet

I knew that if I made a post about how much I personally as a queer person who likes men, like men, I'd get a bunch of shitty terfs in my notes but that still doesn't make me any less annoyed at how fucking stupid they sound

Allow me bestie:

As a queer person, I like men. I LOVE men!!!

It unfortunately happens to be the case that, on the interwebs, the cishet male partners of queer people are not points of pride. This makes me very sad. I've been with my partner for 6+ years. We met in middle school! We've graduated college together! He's going to med school and I'm so proud of him! I love him! And my loving him doesn't diminish my own queer identity!

I love how handsome and how pretty he is. I love how funny he is. I love that he makes me laugh like no one else. I love that he's a little ADHD gremlin that cant ever sit still and I love that he's so fucking smart and can tell me a bunch of stuff about fossils and public housing for the homeless on the drop of a hat but somehow he still can't work an oven. I love his terrible stinky boy smell and I love the terrifying faces he makes when deeply asleep. I love how thoughtful he is, how kind, how caring. I love to touch him and be touched by him. I love going on dates with him and I love having no plans at all and just hanging out together. I love him with all my heart and he's a cishet man. This is not a crime.

We deserve to be proud of our partners, our lovers, and all of the innumerable different shapes that queer love takes. If you think a queer person loving a particular sort of someone in any way diminishes their queerness, please get over yourself.

queer is a gender, sexuality, romantic orientation, political alignment, and mission statement, babey

queer is literally a slur that means weird and strange

and I most certainly am weird and strange, what else you got?

queer is such a good word. im queer as in fuck you. queer as in odd. queer as in fucked-in-the-head. queer as in i hope you choke on it. queer as in a slur i laugh at. queer as in not like you. queer as in none of your business. queer as in a line in the fucking dirt. queer as in we’re here. get used to it. queer as in this is who i am and what i am. queer as in im different and i dont fucking care. queer as in with or without you i exist and ill keep doing it. queer as in queer

i’d rather have rainbow capitalism then living in constant fear of discovery. the woman in the pride flag disney t-shirt might be missing the nuance, but at least i know i can be myself. a street full of rainbow flags makes me more comfortable holding a mans hand. look. corporations aren’t your friend. they will sell to whoever will buy. but kids seeing gay everything every year is only ever a good thing, and a massive improvement in history

And that's that on that.

Apparently I wasn't done 🤔

These are FABULOUS, OP, but can I suggest one to the riff of "QUEERNESS IS NOT DEFINED BY THE AMOUNT PEOPLE HAVE SUFFERED"?

Thanks! Here you go 🥰

Some other additions:

Inspired by @unicorn-in-the-library:

And because @surfs-up-roxy wanted an ace one:

I didn't want to make the message ace-specific because I wanted to make a point of how all of the above include aspec people, but I tried to use an ace colour palette for the background :) I also think the message applies especially (even if not exclusively) to the ace community!

Hope you like these 🥰

@rockmarina possibly “all labels were made up at one point, stop being an ass”?

I played around with the concept a bit, I hope you like it anyway!

I feel like this also needs to be said:

[ID:

Image 1: (in white text, on a background of rainbow watercolors) Gatekeeping hurts queer people who are questioning.

Image 2: (in white text, on a background of rainbow paint strokes) Gatekeeping hurts more queer people than it protects.

Image 3: (in white text, on a background of pastel watercolors) How about you let people question their gender and sexuality in peace.

Image 4: (in white text, on a photo of the rainbow pride flag flying in a blue sky) People don’t owe you a chronicle of their life experiences and feelings for you to decide whether they belong in their own community.

Image 5: (in white text, on a marbled pink background) I don’t know how to tell you this, but you are not the queer police.

Image 6: (in white text, on a background of multicolored textile) Stop siding with our oppressors.

Image 7: (in white text, on a photo of pieces of chalk arranged in a rainbow on asphalt) Not every queer person’s experiences need to be like yours.

Image 8: (in white text, on a background of shiny, rainbow chunks of metal (?)) Mind your own damn business.

Image 9: (in white text, on a mottled black & rainbow background) Let people change labels.

Image 10: (in white text, on a photo of a full moon in a dark sky) There’s no such thing as not being queer enough.

Image 11: (in white text, on a background of paint strokes in pink, white, magenta, purple and dark blue, the colors of the genderfluid pride flag) Vocabulary is designed to be constantly reinvented as human societies evolve, and labels aren’t the exception.

Image 12: (in white text, on a background of pink, purple, and turquoise) Gatekeeping is a product of privilege.

End ID]

Thanks so much for the image descriptions!

Here's one more addition per @secretlycrazyhummingbird's suggestion:

[Image description: (in white text, over a black background with trees decorated with multi-colored lights) Queer people don't have to make themselves palatable to deserve respect. End ID]

And another one, per @mixed-bag-of-tricks's suggestion!

[Image description: (in white text, over a wooden background with curved boards the colours of the rainbow) It's okay to use a label even if it doesn't fit perfectly. End ID]

...you know what, I think the message of this post really boils down to this:

[ID: (in white text, over a black background with striking rainbow lights) gatekeepers are nothing but bullies. End ID]

And I'm really glad this post has helped so many people feel a bit less alone in their struggles. Bullies have made a LOT of damage in this community—have made so many of us feel like impostors, like trenders, like maybe we were making up the things we were feeling—and it makes me so happy we're all pushing back against their hateful, narrow-minded, queerphobic rhetoric.

Keep it up, everyone 💪🏼

Happy pride month to the post that marked the beginning of my journey to overcoming internalised queerphobia

I hate using the language of "canceled/canceling" because it feels delegitimizing but this thing with John Mulaney and Dave Chappelle is a situation where canceling can be something positive and meaningful. On the one hand, people have overblown canceling as this rabid force attacking everyone and everything. On the other, it's become a glib "oh no, don't let the libs cancel you" joke for ultimately pretty harmless shit. But this is someone immensely popular with a platform and a large audience inviting an infamously transphobic comedian to deliver a surprise transphobic, homophobic, and weirdly ableist opening on their tour and then calling that person their best friend.

The first tweet hits particularly hard because it's a reminder that being the butt of a joke that 12,000 people laugh at isn't very far from being the victim of a hate crime. It's not just offensive, it's fucking dangerous. It's demonstrably unsafe.

Transphobia isn't "brave" or "unsanitized comedy", it's a crucial tool for maintaining the status quo of interpersonal and legislative violence.

So yeah, cancel John Mulaney. Hold public figures accountable for targeting us, over and over again.

I would like to remind people that the "gay panic defense" is still very much a thing

So yeah having a fucking transphobe out there telling "jokes" that only further dehumanize trans folks is extra disgusting

You cant say "its just a joke!" When people literally use gay and trans people just existing as an excuse to assult and murder them

I come in kindness when I say this, but the way you approach canceling is part of the reason why people like Chapelle and Mulany were able to do this.

Canceling is real when it impacts people who effect you, but it's not when it impacts others. I urge you to look at why saying that cancelling is overused or incorrectly used until something "actually" bad happens may be harmful, and why it's contributed to the rise of things like this.

You can scrutinize the use of cancelling when it's mostly been used for racist people and highly demonized by the the right, and when the term originated in black circles to go after racist, but understand the correlation it has to this

What makes cancelling less or more valid?

@witches-ofcolor, thank you for bringing this up! Since this post has blown up in the last 24 hours, I'll take the opportunity to clarify some things.

What I was intending to reference here is two very different understandings of what "cancelling" is - neither of which are what cancelling ACTUALLY IS. Cancelling is a crucial tool we have to hold powerful people (public figures, celebrities, etc) accountable for racist, antisemetic, transphobic, and otherwise deplorable behavior. But, in public discourse, you commonly see cancelling used in one of two disingenous ways, which makes begining a conversation with the phrase "John Mulaney is cancelled" sticky, hence my own discomfort begining a convo that way.

The first I reference in my original post is a definitively right-wing stance that "cancelling" is a Liberal Agenda Tool, a CULTURE which has the effect of silencing people "the libs don't like". Most often the cancelled are framed as innocent of all wrongdoing, guilty only of not being "liberal sheeple". To see how "Cancel Culture" gets framed as hysterical, overblown leftist attacks, you don't need to look much further than how conservatives talk about the cancelling of JK Rowling or of Gina Carano. People who are familiar with this idea of cancelling tend to hear "so-and-so is cancelled" and roll their eyes. The effect is the controversy - the racism, misogyny, antisemitism, etc - gets delegitimized as part of the "leftist culture wars"; something that simply twists SJW's britches in a knot and is of no real consequence instead of the demonstrably harmful fuckshit that it is.

The second popular misonception about cancelling that I reference in the original post is this idea that, yes, cancelling IS a tool for social good, but it's ALSO something that can be applied to anything we don't like. A good example of this is #[person]-is-cancelled-parties and you look into it and it's like... a moderately popular youtuber said something stupid, recognizes that what they did was harmful, took tangible steps to rectify their behavior, and made a sincere apology. At that point, you don't need to continue berating that creator. (That's not to say that you aren't justified if you choose to stop engaging with that content - that's totally fine and justified! Sometimes, someone fucks up, but they fuck up in an extremely personally hurtful way that turns you off of them forever, despite taking steps to fix their fuck up. This is not what I'm talking about.) What I'm talking about here is the REVELRY, the perverse ENJOYMENT of harassing someone, of making someone of not-considerable power miserable - sometimes when they've already taken every reasonable step to do better.

As others have justly said, this shift in popular understanding to one or the other above (a conservative finger-point or a gross harassment) is largely due to abuse/misuse by white people. As a white trans person, I'm not going to talk more about that reality because POC in the notes & reblogs have done and will do that much better than I could (see @neshatriumphs' reblog in particular)!

But, I don't think that calling attention to these popular misconceptions and how that has translated to personal discomfort with the verbiage of "cancelling" implies that cancelling itself is in any way less valid. If that was the effect of my original post, I apologize and will reiterate: cancelling Mulaney and Chappelle is NOT an example of the later or the former. This is someone with a MASSIVE AUDIENCE contributing to WIDESPREAD SYSTEMIC VIOLENCE against a vulnerable minority.

Hence why I conclude, "cancel John Mulaney. Hold public figures accountable for targeting us, over and over again."

And this is a small side note, but having seen a lot of the tags on this post, I also want to say that besties, it is OKAY if you really liked John Mulaney. It's not a sin to think his comedy was funny, to like his Netflix bits, or to have been shocked by this turn of events. It is the responsibility of public figures to Not Be Fucking Jackasses. It is not your responsibility to spidey-sense dickholes in advance. I fucking loved John Mulaney and I was rooting for him when he went to rehab. I'm not beating myself up for not seeing this coming. I'm disappointed in the people who deserve the blame: Mulaney and Chappelle.

reblog if you fully and intentionally are referring to aspec people as well when you use the word queer to refer to the community

my partner once said, "if you have to explain your sexuality to straight people, you're probably queer"

it’s almost Pride Month which is the season for my favorite kind of discourse: nerds on the internet playing Pride Police with regard to how much skin the homosexuals are allowed to show, a non-issue that nobody at the actual events cares about, but we for some reason decide to discuss every year

Just so we are clear I personally want to see fucking and sucking on the streets

seriously I had some little TikTok teenybopper burst out laughing on my tour because I said that a historical figure was “most likely what we’d now call gay”

like

listen

you’re free to take a ouija board out to the cemetery and try to explain the dizzying array of current queer terms and get a solid answer as to how he identifies within that framework but 

until then, I’m going to continue NOT definitively assigning someone identity terms they didn’t self-identify with, and might not have even known, when I’m responsible for representing them faithfully and they’re not here to correct me. even more so when they’re part of my own community

I mean, you know, as long as that’s okay with you. Bestie.

#did MODERN historians really say they were just friends? or did modern historians not use precisely the labels you’re accustomed to#and you got in a snit about it?

why would you leave this in the tags??

just saw a post where someone put “detrans dni” and like… hey we should be supporting detransitioned people bc if we don’t terfs will

sometimes you’re wrong about your identity and that’s ok like i used to think i was bi but it turns out i was wrong and i know ppl who thought they were trans but it turns out they were wrong and it should be ok and accepted that sometimes people don’t get it right on the first try

@shadowknight1224 this is an excellent way of putting it thank you

This touches on something I have felt for a long time, which is that one of the reasons rigid queer labels and gatekeeping is so dangerous is because if you want to encourage people to explore their gender/sexuality, there has to be a safe "Actually I was wrong" option.

I went through so very much anxiety coming out, and when I really think about it it was squarely from the fear of being wrong about it all. That I was, at heart, a cishet woman, and therefore I was appropriating a label that didn't 'belong' to me, and I would (somehow) be harming other people by doing so. There's so much more unnecessary pressure if the sword hanging over your head is "But you do have to be right about this, you can't back out once you've even asked the question."

I think that is Bad. I think it makes fewer people ask the question. I think that includes those who need to ask, and would be much happier for it.

to summarize: one of the things the Q stands for is QUESTIONING

and that is as it should be

OH BOY, AN EXCUSE FOR ME TO RANT? THANK YOU @frick-it-all-to-hecc (THEY KNOW DAMN WELL MY THESIS WAS IN PART ABOUT THIS)

Echoing the above: detransition should be an option. Even more than that, it should be supported, not treated as a clinical failure. When we demonize detrans people as "not ever 'truly' trans", "misguided", "examples of how the medical system fails", or "making the trans community look bad" we're giving fuel to the right-wing pundits that want to leverage detransition to prevent any and all transition. Detrans people are people and the reasons for any one individual's transition or detransition are enormously complex and nuanced. No one but the individual should get to pass judgement on any persons' transition/detransition. Transition or detransition are the exercise of individual choice, of bodily autonomy and self-determination. The masses don't - shouldn't, at least - get to have a fucking say about that.

There's this really phenomenal novel written by Torrey Peters - a trans woman - called "Detransition, Baby" and I want everyone to read it. Not only is it (in my humble opinion) fucking hilarious and brilliantly written, it's really fucking honest. One of the main characters is detrans (MFM) - formerly Amy, now Ames. Ames says within the FIRST THIRD OF THE NOVEL:

And I literally had to put the book down and go have a quiet think for a moment because that???? Is so fucking RAW??????

Sometimes, you don't know what you want. That's okay. Sometimes, you move anyways. And you know what? That's okay, too. It can even be good. Sometimes the only way you know what's right for you is to try something and realize it was wrong. We're all kind of just... muddling through, making the choices we think are best, doing what we can in the aftermath. Gender transition is no different. We have got to stop treating it like it is.