Today I was helping run the booth for the local queer non-profit at the farmer's market and a woman told me that she would like a flag, pointing to our little bucket of flags. So I picked up the bucket and I brought it over and asked her which one she'd like.
"Well, tell me about them!"
"Oh! Okay! This one is the inclusion flag- its for everyone, including allies."
"What's this one?"
"That's the bisexual flag: it represents people who are attracted to two or more genders."
"Hmm... what about this one?"
"That's the nonbinary flag: it represents people whose gender isn't strictly 'male or female.'"
"Hmm... what's this purple one?"
"That's the asexual flag: it represents people who may not feel sexual attraction the way that others do."
She put her hand to her chest and got this really curious look on her face. "Tell me more about that!"
"Oh, happy to! So like if you're out with your bestie and someone real fine walks by and she's like 'omg look at him' and you're like 'girl get a grip?' Or like you just don't get what the 'big deal' is about sex or why everyone is so weird about it? But there's also room for like- you don't fall in love with the way someone looks, you're attracted to the person- their sense of humor and their kindness, or there's something about their personality that just makes it click for you? That's asexuality, too!"
And she got real quiet and seemed to think about it for a minute. So I grabbed our little informational sheet about different queer identities and handed her a copy. "If you want to do some research, this is probably a great place to start."
She thanked me and took an ace flag, stuck it in her hair.
Sometimes when you're online all the time, its easy to think that 'everyone knows about (topic), there's no reason to keep talking about it so much.' But while the people on the internet are real people, the internet ISN'T real life. And there are lots of people who do need to know that they do have community!
One of the jokes is that I'm a lot of people's 'patient zero' for discovering that they're queer. This is why.
i can’t wait for when chatGPT and ai image generation also crashes and each prompt cost $50 an attempt. oh you can’t get your stolen big tiddy anime ghibli art for free anymore? you want to buy real big boy art from real artists now? beg for it. beg for it like a dog.
If you’re reading this I’m wishing you a very “discovering a new song that tingles your brain” in the near future.
polls are great but the little "lack of engagement" sentiment that kinda flared up when they dropped was soooo weird. "why aren't you guys reblogging!!! this isn't how this site works you have to share things so more people see them!!!". how can you genuinely believe people are obligated to reblog your post just because they clicked one button to vote in your poll? i think if your post was funnier people would want to reblog it more but it's never that it's "too many new people who don't know how this site works". man even if the funniest, most culturally significant post of all fucking time dropped tomorrow not a single person is obligated to reblog it if they don't want to. get over yourself
israel has now officially been announced as one of the countries participating in eurovision 2024
meanwhile russia is still banned, for the third year in a row. the double standard is just sickening
“The entire British museum is an active crime scene” - John Oliver
On Friendship.
I really do miss back when it was considered fucking weird to ask trans people(or anyone who is even a little gnc/has a label you don't understand/is giving you queer vibes)* what their assigned sex at birth is. Like we literally used to roast cis people for this shit, that's legit why the "what's in your pants" meme exists, but somehow we've reached a point where a very vocal portion of the online trans community genuinely thinks you owe people this information so they can make insane generalizations about you and your life and if you refuse that's cause for suspicion and I really shouldn't have to explain how fucked that is.
Interrogating people about what's in their pants is transphobe/terf/transmed shit. "If you have nothing to fear you have nothing to hide" is fed shit. Tbh "you owe me personal information about your body and medical history" is ableist and intersexist shit. Sex and/or gender tells you literally nothing concrete about a person and there is no world where you are owed this information. Can we cut this shit out and go back to judging people by their words and actions instead of what some random doctor decided their body looks like when they were a squishy baby, you know, like normal people? Please??
*It's also wildly intersexist but unfortunately I don't think we've ever reached a point of collectively accepting that it's horrid to ask intersex people unprompted questions about their bodies and medical histories. You are absolutely not owed any of that information for any reason, especially given that medical history typically goes hand in hand with profound trauma due to how normalized medical abuse against intersex people is, and everyone needs to get that through their heads yesterday. If they want to share they can and will, aside from that it's none-ya.
I keep having to tear down extremely predatory/misleading Scien.tology flyers in my school's art building. This is the third fucking time I've ripped the fuckers up and I'm getting Real Fucking Tired of it.