So like… what do gatekeepers… DO in the real world? Like if they’re at an LGBT+ event and a bi woman is like “Hi I’m Emily and this is my boyfriend,” do they like… confront her? When a person at a support group says “I’m asexual” do they just sit silently and stew in their own rage? Like how do you people function in the real world??
An enormous amount of gatekeepers don’t interact with local queer groups and communities at all. The younger ones don’t have access, and the older ones got black listed a long time ago for being vile.
That lack of access, for the younger ones, is why they are so easily targeted by older radfem types, and is why the age of gatekeepers is so skewed towards young people, btw. They have no way to experience actual queer communities, so they get sucked into this awful, dangerous parody of it.
That was a rhetorical question but this is a damn good answer
I keep seeing my comment on my own dashboard and I just want to say to all the people in the notes who are insisting that I’m making this up that I’ve been out and active in queer politics for 15 years now, in various locations throughout the US as well as in international locations my extended family live in, and trust me when I say, nope. This is legit.
The way adult gatekeepers act gets them thrown out for being vicious more often than not, and leaves them with two options: make their own closed groups where they can interact with like minded bigots away from the main queer spaces in an area, or go online.
Most of them these days pick “go online,” and that’s how they end up finding young queer kids who, for any number of reasons, have not been given access to queer spaces in person, and work on indoctrinating them.
I have seen it happen in person, and I have seen so many people who narrowly escaped that indoctrination, usually when the gatekeeping groups that tried to absorb them revealed themselves to be bigoted in other ways (racism is a common one) that made people realize they needed to leave.
It’s a real thing. Sorry. I’m glad so many of y’all apparently “haven’t seen it” but it’s very much Out There.
All true. However I do find that in many places the most vocal nasty biphobes, aphobes and terfs get blacklisted but the more subtle ones don’t. That is why many bi, asexual and trans people do have the kind of real like experiences this post started out asking about.
Things like being asked is your ‘sure’ about your identity and getting a very disproving look when you say you are. Adding ‘but are you really part of this community?’ as a question to every single debate again and again. ‘Forgetting’ to invite your group to an event every damn time. ‘Forgetting’ to use inclusive language. Etc. Microaggression upon microagression. These things happened in all LGBT spaces I’ve interacted with.
So, the good news is, I got my dream job, which starts in September, and the salary and benefits are good, and they’re even giving me a little bit of money to relocate from my current city to the city where the job is. The bad news is, thanks to a series of unfortunate situations, I ended up having to move into a new place just for the month of August, which is $200 more expensive than my other place was, doesn’t have laundry on suite, and have no food in the fridge here and no coins to take to the laundromat. My paypal.me is here, my paypal email is lingeringdreamer@gmail.com, help a disabled Indigenous autistic two-spirit pay their rent and survive until September!!
Note: Street harassment is an assertion of power in many ways, not just men against women. It’s also about straight people wielding power over queer people, cis people wielding power over trans and gender non-conforming people, thin people over fat people, and more. But in the case of men harassing women, THIS is what that shit is about – not sex.
Ok I just finished reading this article in full and i really recommend it, it gives a lesser known history of whites stealing land from Mexican-Americans/tejanos in texas (more than 187,000 acres over a period of 10 years) as well as the up to 5,000 racially charged killings of Mexican-Americans that took place in the immediate aftermath of el Plan de San Diego
Some additions!
1.) this number almost certainly doesn’t fully encompass native or mixed native-tejano people who were also killed, but even so, wow, that’s….big.
2.) I’m just going to screencap and insert the book quote the article references:
“a number in the low thousands is probable.” Book: Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans Into Americans, Benjamin Heber Johnson, Yale University Press. 2005.
This was essentially a massacre.
3.) Given that this book was written in 2005, I assuming it’s not wholly accounting for just general lynchings of Mexicans Southwest/West (not just Texas!). A 2003 article was published which estimated those numbers – a vastly understudied and unknown part of U.S. history. [This 2003 article notes about 124 documented lynchings during the Mexican-Revolution in Texas – but I don’t know if the cited book separates out lynchings from other recorded deaths above.]
I’m just going to quote the part that stunned me the most when I first read it:
Between 1848 and 1928, mobs lynched at least 597 Mexicans. Historian
Christopher Waldrep has asserted that the definition of lynching has altered so
much over the course of time as to render impossible the accurate collection of
data on mob violence.10 It is therefore essential to familiarize the reader from the
outset with the interpretation of lynching used to compile the statistics in this
essay. The authors regard lynching as a retributive act of murder for which those
responsible claim to be serving the interests of justice, tradition, or community
good. Although our notion as to what constitutes a lynching is clear, it is still
impossible to provide a precise count of the number of Mexican victims. We
have excluded a significant number of reported lynchings when the sources do
not allow for verification of specific data such as the date, location or identity of
the victim. The statistics included in this essay should therefore be considered a
conservative estimate of the actual number of Mexicans lynched in the United
States.
Even when one considers the methodological problems in compiling accurate
data on lynching, it is clear that Mexicans suffered from mob numbers than African Americans. Between 1882 and 1930, it is commonly
noted that at least 3,386 African Americans died at the hands of lynch mobs.
Our research reveals, however, that the danger of lynching for a Mexican resident
in the United States was nearly as great, and in some instances greater, than the
specter of mob violence for a black person in the American South. Because
of the smaller size of the Spanish-speaking population, the total number of
Mexican victims was much lower, but the chance of being murdered by a mob
was comparable for both Mexicans and African Americans.
Comparative data on Mexican and African American lynching victims are
unavailable for the years between 1848 and 1879. However, it is still possible
to place the number of Mexican victims during this time period in context.
As
Table One shows, between 1848 and 1879 Mexicans were lynched at a rate of
473 per 100,000 of population. This statistic is astounding even when compared
with African American victims during the period scholars claim was most rife
with mob violence 1880 to 1930, and in the most lynch-prone states in the
South. During these years, the highest lynching rate for African Americans was
in Mississippi, with 52.8 victims per 100,000 of population. On the basis of
such comparison, the Mexican population of the United States between 1848
and 1879 faced unparalleled danger from mob violence.
You can also see more in Lynching in the West:1850–1935, By Ken Gonzales-Day, which covers about 350 (primarily Latino, but also Asian, and Native) lynchings in California. Carrigan and Webb later came out with a book: Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848-1928. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
I’m not sure if including this article’s numbers with the estimate the book gave for “La Matanza” as a “lynching” number is appropriate (some were lynchings, others maybe not), but if I instead say a “genocide” estimate (whether lynching or state violence), then I’d argue it goes well over 5,000, as the above “500″ estimate is the absolute lowest estimate of documented lynchings. (Also side note: a lot of the times the Anglos that Tejanos did attack were segregationists and racists! So….)
I work in a decent sized, local, indie bookstore. It’s a great job 99% of the time and a lot of our customers are pretty neat people. Any who, middle of the day this little old lady comes up. She’s lovably kooky. She effuses how much she loves the store and how she wishes she could spend more time in it but her husband is waiting in the car (OH! I BETTER BUY HIM SOME CHOCOLATE!), she piles a bunch of art supplies on the counter and then stops and tells me how my bangs are beautiful and remind her of the ocean (“Wooooosh” she says, making a wave gesture with her hand)
Ok. I think to myself. Awesomely happy, weird little old ladies are my favorite kind of customer. They’re thrilled about everything and they’re comfortably bananas. I can have a good time with this one. So we chat and it’s nice.
Then this kid, who’s been up my counter a few times to gather his school textbooks, comes up in line behind her (we’re connected to a major university in the city so we have a lot of harried students pass through). She turns around to him and, out of nowhere, demands that he put his textbooks on the counter. He’s confused but she explains that she’s going to buy his textbooks.
He goes sheetrock white. He refuses and adamantly insists that she can’t do that. It’s like, $400 worth of textbooks. She, this tiny old woman, bodily takes them out of her hands, throws them on the counter and turns to me with a intense stare and tells me to put them on her bill. The kid at this point is practically in tears. He’s confused and shocked and grateful. Then she turns to him and says “you need chocolate.” She starts grabbing handfuls of chocolates and putting them in her pile.
He keeps asking her “why are you doing this?” She responds “Do you like Harry Potter?“ and throws a copy of the new Cursed Child on the pile too.
Finally she’s done and I ring her up for a crazy amount of money. She pays and asks me to please give the kid a few bags for his stuff. While I’m bagging up her merchandise the kid hugs her. We’re both telling her how amazing she is and what an awesome thing she’s done. She turns to both of us and says probably one of the most profound, unscripted things I’ve ever had someone say:
“It’s important to be kind. You can’t know all the times that you’ve hurt people in tiny, significant ways. It’s easy to be cruel without meaning to be. There’s nothing you can do about that. But you can choose to be kind. Be kind.”
The kid thanks her again and leaves. I tell her again how awesome she is. She’s staring out the door after him and says to me: “My son is a homeless meth addict. I don’t know what I did. I see that boy and I see the man my son could have been if someone had chosen to be kind to him at just the right time.”
I’ve bagged up all her stuff and at this point am super awkward and feel like I should say something but I don’t know what. Then she turns to me and says: I wish I could have bangs like that but my darn hair is just too curly.“ And leaves.
And that is the story of the best customer I’ve ever had. Be kind to somebody today.
Honestly I truly do aspire to be that old woman, and I work towards it each day that I can.
…I think you met molly weasley
Rich people force poor people to work for them for wages. The poor do not get to negotiate these wages. Wages are what the market dictates is a fair price for one hour of their labor. Though a cashier at McDonald’s handles easily hundreds of dollars in an hour, she will be paid $7.25 an hour regardless of what her employer earns from her labor and they will insist this is fair. She may hate her job and cry every night on her mother’s pullout couch wishing she could find a better, higher-paying job, but all of this suffering is her choice, obviously.
Oh, that’s right — a lot of people think that if you’re not being coerced to work by top-heavy goons by gunpoint, you’re somehow not being coerced to work. They like to spin these weird pretzels of logic where those without money or resources are actually free to live in a world where the rich have now privatized the commons and kicked out the ladder. When confronted with the reality that single moms work because if they don’t their kids are taken away, they shrug and insist those moms shouldn’t have had kids. When confronted with the bleak dilemma that many millions of chronically ill people face staying in horrible jobs every day to keep their health insurance, they shrug and insist it’s their own fault for getting sick in a country where medical care is prohibitively expensive. So on and so forth.
Capitalist shitbag science means the rationalizations for injustice never end. No, unless you’re literally being held down by gunpoint, none of this will ever qualify as coercion. They always win because you’re always free to choose something else — apparently.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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