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.
Also hot take on the military thing: glad fewer people will be included in the murderous machine of the US military, but also this is an indicator that he’s currently got a weird focus on lgbt people and I guarantee you other things (likely LGB things) are coming very soon because who even was concerned about this? Anyway fuck the military.
Yeah it just comes off as exploitative of the hate already lobbied at trans people for the purpose of bolstering his status with the religious right. which is even more despicable to me because it doesn’t seem to be a genuine belief, just a willingness to take advantage of a people who already face high level of persecution.
i love this except for the “now i make people listen” conclusion, as if that’s all it takes. sometimes it doesn’t matter what you do, they don’t listen.
One of my friends was homeless for a few months and it was a very DESPERATE time. Your money DOES save lives and that could easily be you. I really don’t think people realize how fast you can be in that same situation. In her case, her apartment burned down, but so many other… things can happen to you to get you in that situation. And she saw so much cruelty and unkindness during that time. I can’t even imagine.
Hey guess what? People being poor doesn’t mean they stop having agency.
Also, if they want to buy drugs then that’s fucking ok!!! I work and have a house to live in and I take drugs, god only knows what you’d have to do to cope with being on the streets and treated like trash or just flat out having your existence ignored
Ive only been able to eat because people gave me money, either on here or on the street … Like sometimes you dont got time to go to the food bank, sometimes the food bank won’t give you food, sometimes theres no work, or you get fucking robbed. sometimes thats the ONLY way for me to eat, because life’s a bitch.
This made me fucking sick to look at.
AND WITHDRAWAL CAN FUCKING KILL PEOPLE. Do you know how dangerous withdrawal can be when you live on the street!? Like yeah, I’m sorry, but sometimes maintaining your heroin addiction for a little longer is what is keeping you alive.
it’s so dumb that piercings and tattoos can impact your ability to find a job. employers shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate based on gender, race, sexual orientation, or level of punk-rockness
If you were about to have a surgery done, would you feel comfortable if she/he had gages and tattoos all over their face?
I mean presumably they went to medical school I literally would not give a single shit what they decided to put on their face
what’s with the weird stigma that being closeted is okay but only if it would be physically unsafe for you to come out? coming out is YOUR business, if you know it would be fine & nothing would happen to you & nobody would care, but you don’t want to anyway, that’s your choice and it’s perfectly valid.
Also this is not binary. It can be physically safe, but endanger your job/education, your living situation, your professional or personal contacts. And sometimes you just don’t know if it does.
Do you ever just stop and think about how just being queer is immediately considered an action of deception and hiding? How weird is that, right? If a stranger walks into the room, suddenly I’m no longer out of the closet. I’ve taken no action to declare my identity one way or the other, but now I’m considered responsible for this stranger’s mis-assumption.
Coming out is continuous. You know that thing where two mirrors face each other and you can see infinite mirrors? Coming out is like walking down that mirror passage – there’s always another closet door after the one you’ve just opened, there’s always another person waiting to hold you responsible for their assumptions.
Fuck that noise. If it’s unsafe in any way for you to open the closet door, you don’t have to. If it’s completely and perfectly safe, you still don’t have to. You didn’t put that door there, you’re not responsible for anyone else’s judgments of you. Fuck that noise.
The only reason coming out exists as a concept is because society has codified heterosexuality as the default value. Then instead of recognizing the absence of information as a null i.e. no value, an unknown orientation, we treat the absence of information as confirmation of the default value. So unless otherwise specified, everyone is considered straight. And further if a non-straight individual doesn’t actively work to challenge the default, society holds them accountable and calls it “deception.” So I’ll reiterate from above- fuck that noise. Just because society has established a shitty set of assumptions doesn’t mean you have to play that game. Tell what you want to who you want and sleep well at night knowing you don’t owe anyone anything.
Its been NINE YEARS and i still dont think anyone knows exactly why teen titans was cancelled
Same reason Young Justice and Green Lantern The Animated Series were canceled: Girls liked it. Bruce Timm finally up an’ said it out loud in an interview a while back when he was asked why in the hell GL:TAS had been canceled when it was doing so well on every front; DC’s animation department has institutionally decided that feee-males don’t/can’t/shouldn’t like superheroes, so even if a show is drawing in great viewership numbers and has great toy sales, once they find out that it’s popular with women and girls, they pull the plug on it. Cartoon Network loved Teen Titans— two million viewers for new episodes will do that— and wanted a Season Six, and the production staff was already in the planning stages for it; they were going to have a big arc about Terra and why she was Living Normal, and do a lot more with the extended Titans team members.
This is so fucked up.
To elaborate on this point a bit, the reason this happens is that modern television merchandising aims for total market segregation.
In a nutshell, it’s much more efficient to sell things to people if you can divide them up into tightly defined subcategories that have no interests in common; that way, you never risk accidentally competing with yourself.
This is why children’s toys (and toy sales channels) are actually much more strongly gendered these days than they were forty, thirty, even twenty years ago: one of the basic market segregation splits they’ve decided to use is “boys versus girls”.
Ever wonder why you see Avengers t-shirts that leave Black Widow out of the group shot, or Guardians of the Galaxy action figure lines with no Gamora? That’s market segregation in action.
The upshot is that shows with crossover appeal can actually be cancelled for being too popular with girls; they’re viewed as “stealing” the female market from the specifically girl-targeted media that rightfully “owns” it.
This is the sort of thing folks are talking about when they say gender roles are socially constructed, by the way. The gender split in media merchandising? It’s not just artificial, it’s deliberately imposed as a top-down marketing strategy. When folks try to justify it by saying “this is the ways it’s always been” or “this is just what the market wants”, they’re lying through their teeth – this is, in fact, the merchandisers dictating to the market what it wants in order to sell stuff more efficiently.
(Interestingly, the reverse isn’t always true: if a specifically girl-targeted show unexpectedly becomes popular with boys, sometimes rather than being cancelled, its merchandising will shift to court the male collector’s market. TV execs are so sexist, even their sexism is sexist.)
It gets worse.
Paul Dini, a writer/producer said this on a podcast: “ That’s the thing, you know I hate being Mr. Sour Grapes here, but I’ll just lay it on the line: that’s the thing that got us cancelled on Tower Prep, honest-to-God was, it’s like, ‘we need boys, but we need girls right there, right one step behind the boys’—this is the network talking—’one step behind the boys, not as smart as the boys, not as interesting as boys, but right there.’”
Cartoon network and Warner brothers deliberately made the conscious decision to dumb down their female characters because they want to push female viewers away. In fact, Tower Prep was cancelled because it had too many female viewers because the writers made too many well written female characters.
So shitty representation of girls isn’t something that just happens. It’s the result of deliberate planning just so the execs can make more money.
And it’s not just cartoon network. I mean, why do you think Nick fucked over Korra so badly? Remember them telling Bryke they didn’t want a female Avatar? Why do you think there are no Korra figurines or action figures?
People who perform manual labor should be not only given high and liveable wages, but unlimited access to healthcare and physical therapy to help manage the myriad conditions that come from doing back-breaking work.
Like this is not an absurd concept. It bothers me that people think that it is.
I have literally been yelling about this all day. The Washington Post published a misleading and Ill informed article called Disabled or Just Desperate. The author followed a man living in poverty, reluctant to file for disability after watching his family barely survive on it for various aquaired disabilities. The article implies 1/3 of working age Americans live off of disability checks, and explicitly says signing up to receive disability checks pretty much garuntees you will never work again.
What if fails to point out is if this man had access to healthcare or the money to afford health Care in his line of manual labor, he would likely never had needed disability checks to survive.
The reason so many working age adults receive these checks are because when they are hurt, they work through the injury instead of getting the help they need because they can’t afford the medical bills, or afford to take time off of work to heal.
This is a cycle, and passing the AHCA will only increase these expenses. People who work manual labor need access to health Care and they money to get the extra care they need so they aren’t forced to retire at 40 and collect checks from the government simply to survive.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 