Interestingly, respondents who did not believe homosexuality was a sin increased by a mere two percent, while a greater number of those surveyed said they were now unsure of what they believe.
Click the header link above to read the full article.
[My main Tumblr can be found over at myasphyxiatedmind]
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My name is: Michelle, but most people call me Dark online.
My gender-pronouns are: They/them/their.
I am: 26 years old, a feminist, liberal, an atheist, an omnivore, and an ISFJ.
The Feminist: Intersectional, body positive, pro-choice, and sex positive.
My privileged identities include: Female assigned at birth (trans* privilege), white, able-bodied, allistic (?), dyadic, monogamous.
My non-privileged/oppressed identities include: Gender-fluid, fat, gray-a, neuroatypical, and gay.
I have: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and Major Depressive Disorder.
I like: Pets & animals, animal welfare, pet care & pet care education, ~*SCIENCE!*~, anatomy & physiology, roleplaying, anime/manga, computer & video games, rock & metal music.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Lavender Labia: Five Ways Cis Feminists Can Help Build Trans Inclusivity And...
Five Ways Cis Feminists Can Help Build Trans Inclusivity And Intersectionality
- Be willing to confront instances of transphobia, cissexism, cisnormativity, cis-centrism, cis privilege and other forms of destructive bias where you find them (especially when you find them within feminist, activist or queer spaces), not through “call outs” or other toxic, self-defeating or abusive strategies, but by taking the opportunity for genuine discourse.
- Don’t take a purely passive, reactive approach. Rather than waiting for things like someone saying something overtly cissexist, or a trans person bringing up a particular concern, be willing to proactively introduce trans issues, or trans-relevant aspects of broader issues, to feminist discourse. Likewise, proactively treat possible consequences, perspectives and concerns relevant to trans people and trans experiences as being not only significant but essential to all feminist issues and conversations.
- Don’t assume any given issue is strictly, or even primarily, relevant to cis women. All feminist concerns are also transgender concerns, and vice versa. There are no feminist dialogues in which trans voices “don’t belong”, or to which trans voices have “nothing to add”. There are no social issues related to gender that don’t have consequences for trans people.
- Proactively seek out transgender voices, perspectives and input on all issues, not simply what you regard as “trans issues” or situations where the value of such perspectives is immediately obvious to you. Come to us, rather than waiting for us to come to you.
- Don’t treat the larger social conflict of gender as being dialectic or binary in nature. Don’t assume a unidirectional model of gender-based oppression.
These points are expanded on and explained more in the article. Please do read the full piece - it’s awesomesauce.
(Source: soilwitch)
- # trans
- # trans*
- # transgender
- # cissexism
- # cis
- # cissexist
- # cis feminism
- # ally
- # how to help
- # resources
- # inclusion
- # intersectionality
- # my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit
- # oppression
- # discrimination
- # bigotry
- # social justice
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I think the part of Tumblr that makes me the most tired is the party line of:
“We found this person saying/doing a problematic thing(s) and now no one is allowed to like anything that they have ever said or done, because this happened, and now everyone’s previous experiences with this person’s work are invalid and/or must be disavowed”.
This creeps me out for a wide variety of reasons.
Like let’s say a sad queer kid gets really into a certain writer in high school—idk who to pick, let’s pick Hemingway, because I’m tired.
So this sad queer kid gets super into Hemingway and it helps him survive high school, right?
And then years later this kid reads A Moveable Feast, which is Hemingway’s memoir, and discovers that Ernest Hemingway was a grade A total complete absolute homophobe who destroyed his own relationship with Gertrude Stein by reacting shittily when she explained she was a lesbian.
So there are a few ways we can go with this, right.
We can accept that Hemingway is flawed and complicated, or we can make this kid feel shitty about ever having been into Hemingway and invalidate his queerness by suggesting that the only possible way to be still into Hemingway is through some measure of internalized homophobia.
THIS IS NOT A GOOD WAY TO MODEL SURVIVAL STRATEGIES OR MENTAL HEALTH.
This is a good way to hate yourself!
We are living in hell world, ok, to steal a phrase from Mehron, and the idea that we can somehow isolate ourselves in someplace that isn’t hell world is so problematic on so many levels and relies on so many creepy notions of boundaries and purity! Hell world is all around us and inside of us and in order to deal with that we have to engage with it.
Why do you think I like WAUGH? Absolutely NOTHING about Evelyn Waugh’s politics is even a TINY bit redeemable, as far as I’m concerned.
I’m just tired of all the different ways ~young radicals~ have of determining who’s a “real” radical.
And I think that loudly forever disavowing people who fuck up is a way of implicitly saying, “because I never fuck up, because obviously I don’t, because if I ever fucked up why would I suggest that all people who fuck up be forever removed from the near sphere of people we might like or value”.
And I think that helps ~radical communities~ to foster a certain quality of “but we are Good People” which renders everybody impervious to call-outs once they have amassed enough cultural capital by, idk, talking loudly at events about how much they hate [x].
Disavowal is an incomplete strategy.
Anyone who pulls the “you are not a real [insert minority here] if you like [insert problematic thing here]” can go fuck themselves. I am so sick of this bullshit mentality on Tumblr, this shit doesn’t exist anywhere else, where you are only a good social justice advocate/person if you hate every problematic thing. Frankly if you do that, you are left with one boring ass life since you cannot like anything. Everything has some problematic elements to it. Also, what really pisses me off about this whole mindset is it assumes people do not have critical thinking skills. However, I guess one wouldn’t have critical thinking skills if they cannot admit something they like has problems. -shrugs-
This is something that’s been bothering me for a long time, and there are particular factions of Tumblr that do this all the fucking time. It’s quite a bizarre way to look at the world actually, especially when you’re advocating fairness and equality. Like everyone fucks up — every single person — that’s the whole point of social justice. It’s a learning process; it’s calling people out; it’s articulating the nuance and grey area of social interactions; it’s critical thinking that allows you to say “this is what I like and this is what I would change”; it’s the analysis of culture and people. And for all the oft-heard cries about paying more attention to intersectionality, I barely hear anyone talking about the intersection of “fucking up” and “being a decent person who’s learning and improving all the time”. Those categories aren’t mutually exclusive.
I particularly hate when this attitude extends to “if you even reblog from somebody who has done something problematic in the past (whether you were there for the drama shit-storm or not) you are somehow tainted by association”. It’s fucking ridiculous.
And none of this is takes away from the fact there are obviously super fucked up things where such ostracising the problematic is warranted. But too often that perspective is lost.
Anyhoo. That’s my rant for the moment. Here’s a pertinent quote on the topic.
HuffingtonPost: Americans Who Believe Homosexuality Is A Sin Decreases Significantly: LifeWay Research Poll
Bad news for the Westboro Baptist Church and other right-wing groups: the percentage of Americans who sincerely believe that homosexuality is a sin has decreased significantly, a new poll has found. The Nashville-based LifeWay Research organization revealed that just 37 percent of Americans surveyed in November said they believed homosexual behavior was a sin, a seven point drop from the previous year’s survey.
Re this.
Yeah sorry but.
I was actually a muslim.
And white.
And I didn’t get any of the treatment you claim to have got.
So either you’re trying to make a political statement and lying or you live in a seriously shitty town.
Or maybe the reason you didn’t get treated badly is because even though you were Muslim, you were a white Muslim and thus protected from the racist component of Islamophobia (i.e. a large fucking part of it).
Or are you actually seriously suggesting that Muslim people don’t get treated horrendously in the Western world?
(Source: imperfectwriting)
Maybe we’ve missed the way white Americans have been systemically deprived of access and opportunities. Maybe we’ve overlooked all the times whites have been targeted by implicit and explicit race-baiting attacks, whether they’re playing professional sports or seeking elected office. Maybe we didn’t get the memo on the way the legacy of discrimination against white Americans continues to manifest itself in worse outcomes in income, home ownership, health and employment for them, the way white people are told they’re “objectively” ugly, and the disgust so many Americans felt the last time a white person ran for president.
Oh, wait, none of that has happened? So we’re talking about white people being victimized by things like affirmative action, the Smithsonian’s new black museum and scholarships for minorities? In that case, perhaps the study should be renamed, “Whites Have Forgotten What Racial Discrimination Actually Is.”
(via lavenderlabia)
Pro-tip: white privilege doesn’t mean white people have perfect lives.It means that white people do not have to deal with institutionalized, systemic racism in addition to their everyday problems. It means institutionalized, systemic racism does not cause white people’s everyday problems.
It means when white people go home and turn on their TVs after a long, hard day at work, they can rest assured knowing that they will not only be guaranteed to see people who look like them on the screen, but they will never have to actively search to find a positive depiction of people who look like them.
It means even when white people buy their groceries with food stamps, they don’t have to worry that they’ll be followed around the supermarket for “no reason.”
You think you have no white privilege because you’re poor? Think again. You think your white privilege disappears because you’re not a cisgendered heterosexual? Think again. You think your white privilege disappears because you’re disabled? Think again.
It means that all problems white people face are not exclusive to white people. People of color face those same problems, too. But in addition to any problem white people face, people of color must also bear the burden of dealing with an entire social, cultural, political, economic climate that works against us each and every single day.
And here’s the thing about the effect of racism on PoC’s everyday lives: it’s not like adding one more little thing. This isn’t simple math. Racism isn’t just a “minus 1” on our radar. It informs, guides, and shapes the way every other problem is handled.
Think about it. When white people are pulled over by the cops, their biggest fear is jail time. When black people are pulled over by the cops, our biggest fear is that they’ll kill us and we won’t even get 30 seconds on the 5:00 news.
Bias Persists Against Women of Science, a Study Says - NYTimes.com
Science professors at American universities widely regard female undergraduates as less competent than male students with the same accomplishments and skills, a new study by researchers at Yale concluded.
As a result, the report found, the professors were less likely to offer the women mentoring or a job. And even if they were willing to offer a job, the salary was lower.
The bias was pervasive, the scientists said, and probably reflected subconscious cultural influences rather than overt or deliberate discrimination.
Female professors were just as biased against women students as their male colleagues, and biology professors just as biased as physics professors — even though more than half of biology majors are women, whereas men far outnumber women in physics.
“I think we were all just a little bit surprised at how powerful the results were — that not only do the faculty in biology, chemistry and physics express these biases quite clearly, but the significance and strength of the results was really quite striking,” said Jo Handelsman, a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale.
Three-fifths of Milwaukee’s black voters have vanished without a trace.
The voter purges have resulted in roughly 60% of black voters in that city no longer being registered. That’s 41% of the city’s total votes in 2008. Some perspective on it from reddit user BiscuitCrisps:
You know, back when I lived in a majority-black voter ward, I got purged from the voter rollsevery single year. And every year, I had to trudge back to the registrar of voters, and show them a driver’s license and two months of utility bills to prove that I still lived where I was registered. It’s why I didn’t vote from 1999-2001. I just got sick of re-proving my residence over and over.
My first reaction was: “Fucking incompetent bureaucratic machine”
Then, I moved to a majority-white voter ward … I registeredonce. I haven’t been purged once in the past seven years.
I used to say: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”.
I’m now inclined to chalk the purging up to malice.
This whole thing is fucked.
Disgusting.
Black, trans, brown, “hispanic sounding names”, etc, are all getting purged. It’s disgusting.
this is fucking scary.
PA Teacher Videotapes, Humiliates Gay Student Who Took Trans Date To Prom
We didn’t have the best prom experience—mainly because we took a girl and not the guy we were crushing on. But gay teen Jared Swank of Hanover, PA, had his prom memories tarnished after the fact, when he learned a teacher who videotaped him and his date played the clip for the amusement of her science class.
Swank, who brought a trans girl to prom, had originally allowed the unnamed educator to record them at the dance. But he says he had no idea she was going to show it to other students. “I come to school Monday and that’s when I heard about everything that happened. And it made me really upset. I don’t think it was right.” He tells Eyewitness News he feels “exploited.”
On Thursday, Swank’s mother, Dawn Mendygral, went before the school board and demanded to know why this teacher broadcast the video of Jason and his date, especially since he has been bullied at the school for years. “I don’t know what her intention was, but I know I’m not understanding why she would take it to school and play it in the classroom,” said Mendygral.
Hanover Area School Board President John Pericci said the district considers itself inclusive and welcoming, and confirmed the teacher’s actions are being investigated. A meeting is scheduled for Tuesday between Mendygral and school officials.
And of course they’re protecting the identity of the fucking teacher. This is some straight bullshit!
(Source: transfeminism)
