“I want to lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon against others or being wounded by it myself. I will say this as bluntly as I know how: I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster,” Stryker wrote. “Just as the words ‘dyke,’ ‘fag,’ ‘queer,’ ‘slut,’ and ‘whore’ have been reclaimed, respectively, by lesbians and gay men, by anti-assimilationist sexual minorities, by women who pursue erotic pleasure, and by sex industry workers, words like ‘creature,’ ‘monster,’ and ‘unnatural’ need to be reclaimed by the transgendered. By embracing and accepting them, even piling one on top of another, we may dispel their ability to harm us.”
When we read queer history we’re not only learning about those who came before us. When we listen to our elders we’re not only gaining wisdom. When we observe our braver peers we’re not only finding inspiration. We’re also faced with the reality that we exist because of these other people. Our experiences of queerness, as difficult as they may be, are easier, because there were others who lived before us.
Les caractéristiques des personnes qui s’identifient comme bisexuelles ne témoignent pas vraiment d’une indifférence au genre des partenaires sexuels ou conjugaux, mais d’un élargissement aux personnes de même sexe d’une sexualité dont les personnes de l’autre sexe sont le centre.
Intéressant ce décalage entre déclarations et pratiques. C'est d'une manière similaire que je vis ma bisexualité : Mes pratiques sont majoritairement lesbiennes et c'est bien le lesbianisme que je porte politiquement et je n'envisage pas la moindre conjugalité (ni sexualité) avec des hommes cis bien que je puisse avoir parfois une forte attirance pour certains d'entre eux.
(Et comment s'inscrivent les personnes non-binaires et les hommes trans là dedans ? J'aurais pas assez d'un shaarlien pour l'expliquer, mais illes n'ont certainement pas un statut social et un vécu d'hommes cis)
We, as queer people, do our best to know as much about our own lived experiences as possible, and sometimes we forget that others are trailing behind, and not necessarily by choice. Societal changes are oftentimes felt much more strongly in metropolises than other areas, so can anyone struggling to keep up with queer liberation actually be blamed for that phenomenon? What happened to giving people the benefit of the doubt?
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We must understand that being unsure isn’t the same as being unsympathetic, and that the true bigots aren't the ones taking the time to ask for our help.
In May, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez confronted Gilead, the makers of PrEP, about the pill’s astronomical cost. "The list price is almost $2,000 in the United States. Why is it $8 in Australia?" the senator asked Gilead CEO Daniel O’Day before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. “People are dying because of it, and there’s no enforceable reason for it.” (Gilead posted revenue of $3 billion off the once-a-day pill in 2018.)
Butch/femme is a subculture with no strict rulebook, though there are commonalities within the expression of each identity. Butch women often embody what we traditionally regard as masculinity, wearing short hair, loose clothing, trousers and shorts -- think Orange Is The New Black’s Lea DeLaria or Lena Waithe. Femme women tend to embrace femininity; dresses and skirts, make-up and perfume -- more along the lines of Portia de Rossi or, if you’re into Glee, Santana Lopez.
Despite misconceptions, being femme is not about trying to ‘pass’ as straight. In fact it's far from it. In donning femininity at least partially for the gaze of other women, femmes are able to reclaim a kind of womanhood that’s too often automatically equated with heterosexuality. Similarly, the rejection of feminine gender norms by butches is intrinsically radical: it empowers lesbians to renounce patriarchal standards of beauty, giving them relative freedom to present in whichever way they feel most comfortable.
A 2,554-word essay that aims to explore how to survive a patriarchal capitalist system that forces publications run by young(ish) women—even seemingly wildly successful ones, with robust communities that mourn these losses loudly and vocally—to shut down in spite of their popularity, completely ignored three publications that might have, each in their own way, answered a piece of the thesis question. This article was not the first to completely ignore lesbian and queer women's media when pondering women's websites; it was one in a large compilation of disappointments, as yet another feminist writer I admire did not acknowledge the work queer women's websites do.
An entire section of the rules was devoted to censoring depictions of homosexuality. “Intimate activities (holding hands, touching, kissing) between homosexual lovers” were censored, as were “reports of homosexual groups, including news, characters, music, tv show, pictures”. Similarly blocked was content about “protecting rights of homosexuals (parade, slogan, etc.)” and “promotion of homosexuality”.
It’s a survival mechanism, especially as someone with depression and anxiety, to try to ignore and normalize the dehumanizing experiences I have to move through in order to live. If I were to allow myself to be bothered by quotidian microaggressions and invalidations and othering, I’d maybe never leave the house.
She was hurt by this, and seemed unable to understand why I was unwilling to continue a quasi-romantic relationship with someone for whom my feelings, my intimacy, my body, was the equivalent of a day at a theme park, a fun and whimsical distraction from the everyday. I didn’t feel scorned or heartbroken; I felt used and objectified. Beth saw no harm in using me to make herself feel good because, in her mind, my feelings and sexuality were somehow less legitimate than her own—which is, of course, the very essence of heteronormativity and homophobia.
The community that I have spent my entire adult life working and living in sometimes feels even more dangerous and volatile than the mainstream, cis and heteronormative world that I spent my teen years trying to escape. After all, I can at least blame the cruelty of straight, cis society on homophobia and transphobia. But why are queers so mean to queers?
A TSA agent may press the button that corresponds to the sex a passenger was assigned at birth, but the passenger's gender presentation may mean using a chest binder, packer, or breast shaper, which the machine then marks as inconsistent with the expected algorithm for the passenger's sex, thus triggering an "alarm." Alternatively, the agent may press the button corresponding to the passenger's presenting gender rather than the sex they were assigned at birth, which poses its own problems: A "passing" trans woman's penis, for example, will register to the machine as suspicious.
“I live in a small city,” she says. “Big enough to always be meeting new people, but small enough to see at least three people you know on an outing. I think where I live all the lesbians know each other, all the gays know each other, and so forth. I think it can become a bit of a cesspool where dating is concerned. Everyone you know has dated everyone you know.”
I can only review Euphoria as a gay trans woman who desperately wants to see herself on screen, who desperately wants to see her past, her present, and her potential futures. I can only review Euphoria as a gay trans woman who for the first time on television got to watch a cis girl fall in love with a trans girl. I can only review Euphoria as a gay trans woman who for the first time on television got to watch any girl fall in love with a trans girl.
“You should be allowed to say no,” Dr. Lalich said when I asked her how to tell if you’re in a healthy group relationship. “To question anyone in the hierarchy including the dominant. You should be allowed to leave when you want, without any rebuke or shunning. You shouldn’t be made to believe that this is the only way to live. You should be able to untie the bonds!”
Capitalism is fundamentally invested in notions of scarcity, encouraging people to feel that we never have enough so that we will act out of greed and hording and focus on accumulation. Indeed, the romance myth is focused on scarcity: There is only one person out there for you!!! You need to find someone to marry before you get too old!!!! The sexual exclusivity rule is focused on scarcity, too: Each person only has a certain amount of attention or attraction or love or interest, and if any of it goes to someone besides their partner their partner must lose out.
In his correspondence with Collin, he relates that he is sad to hear that Collin had engaged to a woman at the time, since he has strong romantic feelings for him. Anderson related his feelings to being "feminine" in nature, or that he had "womanly" sentiments towards Collin. This is around the same time The Little Mermaid is written.
This June, a comic cast of “allies” has emerged to pay tribute to Pride, many at the site of Stonewall itself. Each is more menacing than the last: famous white woman Taylor Swift, serial hair-sniffer Joe Biden, the NSA, and even ICE. Swift and Biden’s public relations cameos at the Stonewall Inn confused the movement with the place that happened to spark an uprising. These lip service homages smear the significance of Stonewall and other acts of insurgency that continue to serve as pillars of trans and queer liberation.
"While I love the fact that LGBTQ+ nightlife is expanding and becoming more welcoming to all of us within our community, lesbian specific spaces have suffered, I think, from this inclusivity," said Story, who is co-creator of the local award-winning podcast “Strange Fruit” on WFPL public radio, where she discusses politics, pop culture and black gay life.
In 2012, Story met her now-wife Missy Jackson at Purrswaytions, where Jackson was performing as her drag king persona, "King Mystikal."
"All inclusive LGBTQ+ bars and clubs now host straight bachelorette parties, and many straight-identified folks feel right at home within queer spaces in a way that they didn’t before," she said.
These days, headlines about gay penguins or genderqueer lions seem to pop up all the time. These circulate wildly, and are effective clickbait for curious (or outraged) straights and celebratory queers alike. But these headlines are only effective because of the assumption that nature follows the rules of heteronormativity. As it turns out, however, what we call “queerness” is the norm in nature, not the exception. From toads to nematodes, from dolphins to fruit flies, same-sex sexual behaviors are found in every corner of the animal kingdom. Once you look beyond animals to all of life on earth, well, things get even more queer.
This is the kind of reporting you get when LGBTQ writers and reporters are cut out from mainstream media. It turns our everyday experiences into fodder for pundits, cranks, and transphobes. Phony or inconsequential organizations like “Rethink Identity Medicine Ethics” are elevated to legitimacy by publications who think their readers need to hear “both sides” of an issue, even when one side is composed of hatred. Many in mainstream print media have fallen into this sort of lazy both-sides-ism which ends up promoting the junk science and wild conspiracy theories of the anti-trans and larger anti-LGBTQ movements.