As the UN has released a statement on the UK and it’s hostility to LGBTQI+ rights, we just paid for a 2 billion pound funny hat ceremony, people are freezing and starving, our NHS is being pummeled into the ground, our third prime minister we didn’t vote for, and no one can afford to travel or rent, I have to ask: what is there to be proud of in the UK anymore?
Not something an individual country has done. What point is there in the UK anymore?
most valuable lesson i can teach you is labia and ballsack are the same
The epidemic of young queers ignoring or cherrypicking queer history is really biting us all in the ass because Montana just tabled the bill that banned trans and gay panic, and many of the younger queers I’ve come across have no idea what gay panic really is, or what that means.
All they know about gay panic is the “Oh my gosh! I talked to a pretty girl/boy and I’m a girl/boy hehe so flustered” that at some point replaced the actual meaning of gay panic. Do you know how dangerous this is, that they don’t know of the dangers of trans and gay panic? It’s lethal.
As things in the US become more dire for the queer community, I’m begging the young queers: read up on queer - our, your - history. Talk to your elder queers. Really look into current politics surrounding the queer community. Don’t get all your info from social media, and absolutely do not take what you see on social media at face-value. Get yourself educated and prepared for what’s to come. It’ll save lives, I promise you.
[Img id: bugs bunny meme. To the left the text reads, "I wish all people with chronic digestive problems a very plesant evening".]
The epidemic of young queers ignoring or cherrypicking queer history is really biting us all in the ass because Montana just tabled the bill that banned trans and gay panic, and many of the younger queers I’ve come across have no idea what gay panic really is, or what that means.
All they know about gay panic is the “Oh my gosh! I talked to a pretty girl/boy and I’m a girl/boy hehe so flustered” that at some point replaced the actual meaning of gay panic. Do you know how dangerous this is, that they don’t know of the dangers of trans and gay panic? It’s lethal.
As things in the US become more dire for the queer community, I’m begging the young queers: read up on queer - our, your - history. Talk to your elder queers. Really look into current politics surrounding the queer community. Don’t get all your info from social media, and absolutely do not take what you see on social media at face-value. Get yourself educated and prepared for what’s to come. It’ll save lives, I promise you.
I’ve been going back and forth on posting anything rebloggable about Eden Knight, because simply posting something feels like…such a non-action. But it’s worse to say nothing at all, and the people who loved her clearly want her story to be known. So I’ll try.
A Saudi trans woman named Eden Knight died by suicide after her parents hired two American “fixers” and a Saudi lawyer to traffic her back to Saudi Arabia and forcibly detransition her. Her loved ones have put together a document about this tragedy in hopes that something can be done:
I feel like the cultural piece of this hasn’t get discussed, and i understand why; I’ve seen plenty of utterly sickening commentary from people who can’t be normal about the idea of a trans Saudi, but I feel I’m in a position to break the silence around this, as being a queer Arab myself, the nuances aren’t lost on me. So I’ll try that too:
Arab culture is patriarchal (like most cultures are), communal, and honor-based, which contributes to many Arab parents wholeheartedly believing that they own their children and that they need to control them to prevent any “dishonorable” behavior, even at the cost of death. This is not unique to Arab culture, and I’m really simplifying here, but this is why honor killings happen, and I think it’s remiss to not name the honor-based violence at play in what happened to Eden. She threatened her family’s honor by not adhering to the gendered role coercively assigned to her, and so they inflicted the conditions that led to her death upon her. And I can guarantee that, had her parents not had the money to hire some of their fellow monsters to destroy their daughter, they’d have recruited extended family to stalk her or found another way instead. Honor culture is self-policing.
It’s also remiss to not name the other forces that killed Eden: transmisogyny in both the United States and Saudi Arabia—the latter obviously being worse than the former, but fleeing to the former DID NOT PROTECT HER, so USAmericans can hold off from being smug about her being Saudi, thanks—and her migrant status. The State, capital-S, and its borders assisted Eden’s parents in this.
We need support networks that can actually help trans people with complex cultural/legal situations like this. We need support networks to prevent honor-based violence, which primarily impacts women and LGBT people of any gender. “Just cut off your parents” isn’t helpful when you’ve been raised to internalize this level of guilt and shame, and it especially isn’t helpful when your parents are willing to find you and abduct you to protect their image. There needs to be SOMETHING to prevent tragedies as horrific as this. I can’t say I have the answers. But there needs to be some understanding of how far this honor shit can go, how it can cross borders, and how even people who have found community outside their abusive families can still be very vulnerable to it.
I’m so sorry, Eden. You deserved the world. Rest in peace.
right now it’s almost halfway through 2023, and 2024 is an election year in the US. I have started to see a growing proliferation of posts suggesting that there is no difference between the republican and democratic parties–the exact same kind of posts I saw an awful lot of before the last major election here. I am unfollowing folks who post or reblog these sort of posts, as I consider these posts to be fascist propaganda framed as leftist discourse, designed to suppress anti-fascist votes and voters.
new post bc i really need folks to stop spreading tactics that are going to get missourians killed.
attorney general bailey has set up a website where you can report “concerns” about transgender care.
bailey will take those entries as real stories and use them as fuel to come down even harder on transgender care in missouri. instead, do what we usually don’t do and spam the absolute shit out of it. vary your submissions so they can’t just filter out certain keywords. but DO NOT submit stories that could sound real, because bailey will present them as real.
here is the link.