people need to realize that dissolving the lines between gender also means dissolving the lines between sexuality. you cannot say gender is fake and then say sexuality is strict and rigid.
there are multigender/genderfluid people who are lesbians and gay men at the same time. there are mspec lesbians/gays/straights who have a complex relationship with gender and their sexuality. there are gay men who are women and lesbians who are men because male isn't the opposite of female.
"conflicting" labels are a part of many people's queer experience, because the human experience isnt simple enough to be put into neat perfect categories. if you truly support trans/genderqueer people, you need to accept the fact that gender and sexuality is complex and there will be people whose identities you don't understand
The best part of worldbuilding is making something that sucks. Magic schools with bullshit rules that don't work. Spaceships that are built stupid. My favourite thing to do is to make an inconvenient world that is full of stupid things for boring reasons, and then putting a character int here and making them live with that.
Continuing my post about why I'm tired of TERFs: Come the fuck on. I spent most of my life back when I thought I was a cis girl being made to feel like shit because I had to get repeated surgeries on my breasts because of a chronic condition. It was other women who told me to reconsider if I wanted to "ruin my tits" and "mutilate myself" and if I couldn't just put up with the unbearable chronic pain it caused.
It was also women who told me I should consider plastic surgery if I ever needed to get a mastectomy, which is something I'll need sooner than later. I was a MINOR when I got told this.
It was ALSO a woman who told me that even if my condition has a 4% chance of turning malignant, I should not get the mastectomy that could reduce that to almost a 0%, because "So many women regret it later".
Now I decide that feminity is not for me, that I'm tired of putting up with it after being told a thousand times about how I'm doing it bad, and now I'm betraying womanhood. I have to hear how they keep talking of any breast surgery as mutilation and "ruining a perfect healthy female body" but I'm the evil one for finding that being non binary suits me better.
All while TERFs repeatedly show they'd rather work with the far right to take everything from trans people, the same groups actively also harm women. They devote their entire existence to harming trans women, who are some of the fiercest fighters for women's rights, and then go silent when pro-lifers fuck up bodily autonomy.
Who in the actual fuck is actually betraying womanhood here?
new post bc i really need folks to stop spreading tactics that are going to get missourians killed.
attorney general bailey has set up a website where you can report “concerns” about transgender care.
bailey will take those entries as real stories and use them as fuel to come down even harder on transgender care in missouri. instead, do what we usually don’t do and spam the absolute shit out of it. vary your submissions so they can’t just filter out certain keywords. but DO NOT submit stories that could sound real, because bailey will present them as real.
here is the link.
there's been a lot of obnoxious pop history trends in the last few years but the bizarre total sanitization of vikings/pirates has to be one of the worst. like sorry to the queer neopagan anarchy symbol in bio twitter user community but like. are you aware both vikings and pirates enthusiastically traded slaves
April 28, 2023
I’m so sorry for the long post but please please please pay attention and spread this
What is the EARN IT Act?
The EARN IT Act (s. 1207) has been roundly condemned by nearly every major LGBTQ+ advocacy and human rights organization in the country.
This is the third time the Senate has been trying to force this through, and I talked about it last year. It is a bill that claims "protects children and victims against CSAM" by creating an unelected and politically appointed national commission of law enforcement specialists to dictate "best practices" that websites all across the nation will be forced to follow. (Keep in mind, most websites in the world are created in the US, so this has global ramifications). These "best practices" would include killing encryption so that any law enforcement can scan and see every single message, dm, photo, cloud storage, data, and any website you have every so much as glanced at. Contrary to popular belief, no they actually can't already do that. These "best practices" also create new laws for "removing CSAM" online, leading to mass censorship of non-CSAM content like what happened to tumblr. Keep in mind that groups like NCOSE, an anti-LGBT hate group, will be allowed on this commission. If websites don't follow these best practices, they lose their Section 230 protections, leading to mass censorship either way.
Section 230 is foundational to modern online communications. It's the entire reason social media exists. It grants legal protection to users and websites, and says that websites aren't responsible for what users upload online unless it's criminal. Without Section 230, websites are at the mercy of whatever bullshit regulatory laws any and every US state passes. Imagine if Texas and Florida were allowed to say what you can and can't publish and access online. That is what will happen if EARN IT passes. (For context, Trump wanted to get rid of Section 230 because he knew it would lead to mass govt surveillance and censorship of minorities online.)
This is really not a drill. Anyone who makes or consume anything “adult” and LGBT online has to be prepared to fight Sen. Blumenthal’s EARN IT Act, brought back from the grave by a bipartisan consensus to destroy Section 230. If this bill passes, we’re going to see most, if not all, adult content and accounts removed from mainstream platforms. This will include anything related to LGBT content, including SFW fanfiction, for example. Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Tumblr, all of them will be completely gutted of anything related to LGBT content, abortion healthcare, resources for victims of any type of abuse, etc. It is a right-wing fascists wet dream, which is why NCOSE is behind this bill and why another name for this bill is named in reference to NCOSE.
NCOSE used to be named Morality in Media, and has rebranded into an "anti-trafficking" organization. They are a hate group that has made millions off of being "against trafficking" while helping almost no victims and pushing for homophobic laws globally. They have successfully pushing the idea that any form of sexual expression, including talking about HEALTH, leads to sex trafficking. That's how SESTA passed. Their goal is to eliminate all sex, anything gay, and everything that goes against their idea of ‘God’ from the internet and hyper disney-fy and sanitize it. This is a highly coordinated attack on multiple fronts.
The EARN IT Act will lead to mass online censorship and surveillance. Platforms will be forced to scan their users’ communications and censor all sex-related content, including sex education, literally anything lgbt, transgender or non-binary education and support systems, aything related to abortion, and sex worker communication according to the ACLU. All this in the name of “protecting kids” and “fighting CSAM”, both of which the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact it makes fighting CSEM even harder.
EARN IT will open the way for politicians to define the category of “pornography" as they — or the lobbies that fund them — please. The same way that right-wing groups have successfully banned books about race and LGBT, are banning trans people from existing, all under the guise of protecting children from "grooming and exploitation", is how they will successfully censor the internet.
As long as state legislatures can tie in "fighting CSAM" to their bullshit laws, they can use EARN IT to censor and surveill whatever they want.
This is already a nightmare enough. But the bill also DESTROYS ENCRYPTION, you know, the thing protecting literally anyone or any govt entity from going into your private messages and emails and anything on your devices and spying on you.
This bill is going to finish what FOSTA/SESTA started. And that should terrify you.
Senator Blumenthal (Same guy who said ‘Facebook should ban finsta’) pushed this bill all of 2020, literally every activist (There were more than half a million signatures on this site opposing this act!) pushed hard to stop this bill. Now he brings it back, doesn’t show the text of the bill until hours later, and it’s WORSE. Instead of fixing literally anything in the bill that might actually protect kids online, Bluemnthal is hoping to fast track this and shove it through, hoping to get little media attention other than propaganda of “protecting kids” to support this shitty legislation that will harm kids. Blumental doesn't care about protecting anyone, and only wants his name in headlines.
It will make CSAM much much worse.
One of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous: It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works – without fear of liability for any “failure.” Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with. This liability would allow anyone for any reason to sue any platform they want, suing smaller ones out of existence. Look at what is happening right now with book bans across the nation with far right groups. This is going to happen to the internet if this bill passes.
(Remember, the state department released a report in December 2021 recommending that the government crack down on “obscenity” as hard the Reagan Administration did. If this bill passes, it could easily go way beyond shit red states are currently trying. It is a goldmine for the fascist right that is currently in the middle of banning every book that talks about race and sexuality across the US.)
The reason these bills keep showing up is because there is this false lie spread by organizations like NCOSE that platforms do nothing about CSEM online. However, platforms are already liable for child sexual exploitation under federal law. Tech companies sent more than 45 million+ instances of CSAM to the DOJ in 2019 alone, most of which they declined to investigate. This shows that platforms are actually doing everything in their power already to stop CSEM by following already existing laws. The Earn It Act includes zero resources for proven investigation or prevention programs. If Senator Bluementhal actually cared about protecting youth, why wouldn’t he include anything to actually protect them in his shitty horrible bill? EARN IT is actually likely to make prosecuting child molesters more difficult since evidence collected this way likely violates the Fourth Amendment and would be inadmissible in court.
I don’t know why so many Senators are eager to cosponsor the “make child pornography worse” bill, but here we are.
HOW TO FIGHT BACK
EARN IT Act was introduced just two weeks ago and is already being fast-tracked. It will be marked up the week of May 1st and head to the Senate floor immediately after. If there is no loud and consistent opposition, it will be law by JUNE! Most bills never go to markup, so this means they are putting pressure to move this through. There are already 20 co-sponsors, a fifth of the entire Senate. This is an uphill battle and it is very much all hands on deck.
CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES.
This website takes you to your Senator / House members contact info. EMAIL, MESSAGE, SEND LETTERS, CALL CALL CALL CALL CALL. Calling is the BEST way to get a message through. Get your family and friends to send calls too. This is literally the end of free speech online.
(202) 224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline. Here is a call script if you don't know what to say. Call them every day. Even on the weekends, leaving voicemails are fine.
2. Sign these petitions!
Link to Petition 1
Link to Petition 2
3. SPREAD THE WORD ONLINE
If you have any social media, spread this online. One of the best ways we fought back against this last year was MASSIVE spread online. Tiktok, reddit, twitter, discord, whatever means you have at least mention it. We could see most social media die out by this fall if we don't fight back.
Here is a linktree with more information on this bill including a masterpost of articles, the links to petitions, and the call script.
TLDR: The EARN IT Act will lead to online censorship of any and all adult & lgbt content across the entire internet, open the floodgates to mass surveillance the likes which we haven’t seen before, lead to much more CSEM being distributed online, and destroy encryption. Call 202-224-3121 to connect to your house and senate representative and tell them to VOTE NO on this bill that does not protect anyone and harms everyone.
The strange and surreal furniture by Korean designer/artist Lila Jang.
It is not inappropriate for AAC users to have acsess to swear words.
My peers started swearing at around age 10, and if that is what language the speaking people of that age are using, nonspeaking people have the same right.
Not giving us acsess to the same type of language as our peers feels alienating, it doesn't let us communicate with the same language and terms our peers and friends do. We are not babies. We are not stupid. We are the same as our speaking peers. Just because you can sometimes control what language we use, doesnt mean you should.
So I've seen this circling in both TERF circles and in trans circles...
"Stop saying this is a genocide against trans people, that's disrespectful to Jewish people!"
First, it is perfectly accurate to call something a genocide when politicians are openly saying at rallies "transgenderism must be eliminated". That is calling for genocide!!
Second, there is more than one way to commit genocide; it doesn't just mean "forcing them to wear symbols, rounding them up and murdering them in camps". Genocide includes inflicting great harm to a group of people with the intent of erasing them from existence. Many different groups of people have had genocide committed against them, including the indigenous people of the Americas.
Denying trans people the right to transition, making it illegal to talk about trans people in school, forcibly detransitioning trans people, forcing them to live in the closet, forcing them to be sterilized in order to transition, labeling "living with a trans person" as child abuse so you can take away their children, and making it illegal to openly identify as trans, are all acts of genocide. They are all designed to destroy trans people.
You may think it cruel but when a white witch pisses me off I go through her etsy listings for native bird feathers and forward it to fish and wildlife services