White People Hijack Every Single Movement They Join

AWWW! 💓

s/o to the artists on tumblr that spend hours making art and only get three notes if theyre lucky. youre still awesome and your art is still fantastic

Oh Billy, you look so small right there…

Neglected children will sometimes reassure adults that they’re fine, even when they’re in a horrible state. Neglected kids will feel guilty if anyone is worried about them because they don’t want to be a bother, feel badly for taking anyone’s attention, and don’t want to cause any concern. If as a kid you reassured and convinced people that you’re okay, when you were anything but, know that it’s normal for abused kids to do that. Concern and worry are often things we get guilt tripped for, we’re told we’re “bad” for making anyone worry, “selfish” for causing any kind of distress.

This doesn’t mean anyone is allowed to use this to change the narrative into ‘but you said you were okay’ when you finally admit you were not. Pain and struggle is visible on a child, regardless of how good an actor the child is, for anyone who bothers to pay attention. You pretending you were fine does not absolve anyone of hurting or neglecting you. A child always left to their own devices, reassuring others and insisting they don’t need any attention ever, is obviously not fine. Healthy children thrive on attention and always try to get more.

My very last comic for The Nib! End of an era! Transcription below the cut. instagram / patreon / portfolio / etsy / my book / redbubble

The first event I went to with GENDER QUEER was in NYC in 2019 at the Javits Center.

So many of the people who came to my signing were librarians, and so many of them said the same thing: "I know exactly who I want to give this to!" Maia: "Thank you for helping readers find my book!" While working on the book, I was genuinely unsure if anyone outside of my family and close friends would read it. But the early support of librarians and two American Library Association awards helped sell two print runs in first year.

Since then, GENDER QUEER been published in 8 languages, with more on the way: Spanish, Czech, Polish, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portugese and Dutch.

It has also been the most banned book in the United States for the past two years. The American Library Association has tracked an astronomical increase in book challenges over the past few years. Most of these challenges are to books with diverse characters and LGBTQ themes. These challenges are coming unevenly across the US, in a pattern that mirrors the legislative attacks on LGBTQ people. The Brooklyn Public Library offered free eCards to anyone in the US aged 13-21, in an effort to make banned books more available to young readers. A teacher in Norman, Oklahoma gave her students the QR code for the free eCard and lost her job. Summer Boismeir is now working for the Brooklyn Public Library. Hoopla and Libby/Overdrive, apps used to access digital library books, are now banned in Mississippi to anyone under 18. Some libraries won’t allow anyone under 18 to get any kind of library card without parental permission. When librarians in Jamestown, Michigan refused to remove GENDER QUEER and several other books, the citizens of the town voted down the library’s funding in the fall 2022 election. Without funding, the library is due to close in mid-2024. My first event since covid hit was the American Library Association conference in June 2022 in Washington, DC. Once again, the librarians in my signing line all had similar stories for me: “Your book was challenged in our district" "It was returned to the shelf!" "It was removed from the shelf..." "It was moved to the adult section."

Over and over I said: "Thank you. Thank you for working so hard to keep my book in your library. I’m sorry you had to defend it, but thank you for trying, even if it didn't work." We are at a crossroads of freedom of speech and censorship. The future of libraries, both publicly funded and in schools, are at stake. This is massively impacting the daily lives of librarians, teachers, students, booksellers, and authors around the country. In May 2023, I read an article from the Washington Post analyzing nearly 1000 of the book challenges from the 2021-2022 school year. I was literally on route to a festival to talk about book bans when I read a startling statistic. 60% of the 1000 book challenges were submitted by just 11 people. One man alone was responsible for 92 challenges. These 11 people seem to have made submitting copy-cat book challenges their full-time hobby and their opinions are having an outsized ripple effect across the nation. WE NEED TO MAKE THE VOICES SUPPORTING DIVERSE BOOKS AND OPPOSING BOOK BANS EVEN LOUDER. If you are able too, show up for your library and school board meetings when book challenges are debated. Send supportive comments and emails about the Pride book display and Drag Queen story hours. If you see a display you like– for Banned Book Week, AAPI Month, Black History Month, Disability Awareness Month, Jewish holidays, Trans Day of Remembrance– compliment a librarian! Make sure they feel the love stronger than the hate <3

Maia Kobabe, 2023

The Nib

An old and homely grandmother accidentally summons a demon. She mistakes him for her gothic-phase teenage grandson and takes care of him. The demon decides to stay at his new home.

I get so fucking angry when people try to rationalize why parents abuse children and it’s always “oh parents have been thru it too” “oh they had a hard life” “oh they were abused too” “oh they never knew love so how could they give it” and what they’re basically saying is: Well, the child is suffering but it’s not anybody’s fault. It was inevitable. And you know what that means? There’s nobody to blame, there’s no way to stop it, parents who have had difficulties in life will always abuse their kids and children will just have to suck it up because that’s life.

Well then, what about me? And others like me? We’ve been brutalized by our parents severely, we haven’t known anything except neglect and pain and hatred, and would never do it to another living soul on earth, much less a child. What are we then? An exception? Are we so much fucking smarter and intelligent and insightful than all the parents on the world that we figured this out? Are we special cases? Are we miracles? How come our parents couldn’t have figured out what we have, that hurting a child is an act of evil and that we cannot claim to be a good person after we do that? How come something so fucking simple and obvious has eluded all of their eyes over and over again but we know it? How come if everyone abused has no choice but to become a monster themselves, we’re not monsters still? If we could suffer abuse and remain human, why couldn’t they do it to?

We’re the proof that abuse does not produce abusers. Abuse is a choice, every single time a parent abuses a child they’re making a choice to do it. And the easier this choice is to make and get away with, the more abusers we will have. This world is run by abusers and makes it easy for abusers to make that choice, even relives them out of the guilt for choosing that and provides them with many “worse” examples and excuses and rationalizations so they would still feel good about themselves! This world is fighting to continue child abuse, to continue worshipping abusers. This needs to stop, all excuses need to die. All abusers need to be held responsible for their own actions, every single one. No sad backstories, no tragic histories, no debate about how much harder it would be to not abuse a child than to abuse them. If we could make a choice to not abuse others, so can they. Their last excuse is burned to the ground by our existence.

ALL this.

I question the character of adults who are jealous of children.

I'm noticing that adults are often very offended when they see a child who has something they themselves didn't have in their childhood. I've had someone randomly start ranting about how their own grandchildren have 'too much toys', and how they don't appreciate any of it. They went on to explain how they, as a child, only had one toy, and they had to play with that one alone. They're also upset that children can now use phones, which also wasn't an option in their own childhood.

This is concerning to me, because while busy noticing all the things that children have, which are toys and phones, people don't tend to notice the things we had that are no longer available to the new generations. Planet free of pollution, free of climate change, adults got to experience that. Economy that isn't in this bad of a state, availability of jobs, education being worth something, financial safety, probability of owning a home. All of this has critically declined and turned into unstable, unreliable and difficult to manage situation for children, to the point where there's no clear path to a safe future anymore, for anyone. Current children have to invent jobs and find a way to produce a safe future without relying on an existing path, something that was available for most of the population in the past.

And the availability of phones and toys is not necessarily a luxury; back then nobody had a phone, or a mountain of toys, so it would be unusual and privileged for just one child to have it. But when everyone has that, it would be unusual and almost humiliating not to have it. The prices of these had reduced, they're more available and easy to get. The phones connected to the internet will ensure that the child will be exposed to a lot of information every day, and they'll have to find a way to deal with all that, it can become overwhelming and damage their attention span and emotional stability, if they're constantly exposed to distressing or disturbing information, which often finds its way to kids.

What will it mean for their life, if they had toys and phones as kids, but later on, they don't have a safe job? They can't hope to have a home of their own? They are not at freedom to financially plan their futures, their families, they have to depend on their own parents or relatives to get by? What will it feel like when they can't count on the climate and safe and reliable food sources? What when they're suffocated by the financial demands of just staying alive and fed? What if they don't have anyone to help financially? What if they're rendered mentally ill by the stress and perils happening in the world, all of it so close to them via constant overload of pain and suffering?

Having toys and phones is nothing compared to having an experience of a safe, stable, predictable life, on a planet with a normal, stable climate. We failed to secure this to our children. We have no business being jealous that they now have a phone.