Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me.
I know there is a lot of discourse ™ around this right now but listen to me
sometimes you do just have to lie to children.
If, when my toddler is, you know, toddling around saying “mama? Big ball?”
If I were lean down and say “unfortunately the big beach ball for some reason fills you with such an unadulterated rage that is beyond human comprehension that you scream until you pass out, so mama had to remove the beach ball from the premises until you can better regulate your emotions” she would simply stare at me like I had 3 heads full of equal betrayal.
So, for now, instead “big ball went night night!”
Please understand when I say “removed the ball from the premises” I mean I popped it in a fit of exhausted confusion. I murdered the beach ball.
See I’ve lied to you all too and it was better this way.
you can’t just leave this in the tags etc.
You can’t be funnier then me on my own posts, I’m in tears from laughter
When my kiddo finally decided (at age 20) that it was time for (most of) his enormous Lego collection to go, it was a gut-wrenching moment for me (goodbye childhood!). However, we used this service, which was simple and hassle-free.
i was thinking about that post comparing Jessica Rabbit as an asexual to Barbie and an asexual and then i thought of the Neil Gaiman post (was it a post?) about Crowley and Aziraphale being asexual and then this happened.
My brother is a librarian, and his library is one of the ones that hosts Drag Queen Story Time.
He is also 6'3", 300 lbs of Heavy Weapons Librarian.
This week, some karen showed up to take video of said storytime. She was unmoved by the director of the library telling her their policy against taking video in the children’s room.
My brother was also unmoved. Specifically, he was unmoved from his position directly in the line of karen’s cellphone. She got video of an acre of blue broadcloth shirt, and that’s it.
Other people who showed up to scowl at the drag queen decided they had other things to do that day when my brother scowled at them. He inherited our Mama’s scowl, and it’s a good one.
Sometimes, an ally looks like a big fat bald white guy. Sometimes, an ally looks like a wall.
web 2.0 companies that try to frame people using adblockers as greedy freedloaders always conveniently turn their heads when those same “greedy freeloaders” tell them that advertisers are paying to put malicious and predatory ads on their playforms and adblock users are, by in large, using adblockers to protect themselves
the first time i ever saw an adblocker recommended was for people with photosensitive epilepsy getting barraged with “congrats! you won!” style popups nonstop
the first time i ever personally used an adblocker was when deviantart’s excessive ad placement slowed down my household’s shared computer to the point it was unusable and my mom told me to stop using deviantart. so instead i installed an adblocker
and nowadays on Youtube and Facebook you get ads for casinos and alcohol targeted toward addicts and people with bipolar disorder, quack medicine targeted to people with chronic medical conditions, hate speech targeted toward the victims of said hate speech, and horror movie ads with flashing lights targeted toward…everyone.
and of course Google, who serves a majority of these ads, doesn’t actually care to remove any of the dangerous bullshit it shoves in your eyes but will expect you to pay them for it. sorry, i’d just rather not use youtube at that point. you had your chance.
Do not ever listen to a word of shame from a corporation. Their goal is only and always to extract maximum value from consumers.
Piracy, adblocking, data encryption, third-party repair, literally all of these things are, bottom-line, only bad for the corporations’ record-breaking profit line. They are inherently good for the working person.
somehow instead of saying “as a treat”, I’ve started using the phrase “for morale”, as if my body is a ship and its crew, and I (the captain) have to keep us in high spirits, lest we suffer a mutiny in the coming days.
and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.
I’m not sure if it helps, but it does entertain me
Look, if you’re starving in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and suddenly someone is like ‘oh I have tons of food and it just happens to be meat do you want some lol’ you CANNOT act surprised when it’s people. You simply CANNOT.
There are times and places where it is realistic to expect NOT to be served people. For example, in a pie shop underneath a barber shop. THEN you can be all 'OH GOD IT’S PEOPLE.’
If you are in a post-apocalyptic wasteland and are suddenly served a really good meat pie, you have to know it’s people. Do you see any cows? No, they all apocalypsed. It’s your neighbor.
If you’re served food in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, ask yourself these questions first:
Do I trust the person feeding me?
Is this meat fresh, and if so, have there been any livestock non-apocalypsed recently?
Have I seen Kevin within the past week?
Am I willing to commit the penultimate culinary taboo? (The ultimate culinary taboo is putting pineapple on pizza, a crime I regularly commit)
building off of this post, people love to say that “trans men want to keep going into in women’s spaces after they transition because they just want to have the best of both worlds!” but in my experience, there are four main reasons that a trans man might use a “women’s space” after they transition:
it’s an important resource that’s being arbitrarily gendered and we need to use it regardless of which gender is “supposed to” be using it.
it’s a public facility where we’d be significantly less safe in the men’s version and we have to choose our safety over our desire to not be misgendered.
it’s a social space that we’ve been in since before we transitioned and we don’t want to suddenly be cut off from our friends and support system.
the trans man in question is multigender and is also a woman, or maintains some other kind of connection to womanhood alongside their manhood.
do any of those sound like “evil men rubbing our dirty little hands together making plans for how we’re going to get male privilege without losing access to women’s spaces” to you? they sure don’t to me!
i think it’s pretty reasonable that we want to transition without losing the ability to access the resources we need, keep ourselves safe, keep up the relationships we’ve built, and express all facets of who we are. all of those are really, like, pretty basic parts of having good life and we shouldn’t be expected to give them up when we transition.
and honestly, if you claim to care about trans people, you should not be so attached to the gendering of these spaces that you’re willing to deny trans men those things for the sake of upholding gender restrictions. anyone who prioritizes the sanctity of gender segregated spaces over the safety, health, and well-being of trans men is a fucking transphobe. (yes, even if you’re trans yourself.)
and that’s what really gets me about all of this — the vehemence with which people are willing to defend those spaces being entirely and inflexibly gendered, despite how enforcement of gendered spaces has hurt trans people time and time again. gendered spaces have literally always been set up in ways that force trans people to break the rules; some trans men might break those rules in ways that don’t make sense to you, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong for us to do so! it just means you might feel weird about it and that’s okay, discomfort won’t kill you.
“but using women’s spaces after transitioning to male defeats the purpose of transitioning! the whole point of transitioning is to be able to live as a man!”
and who are you to tell trans men what the point of our transitions should be? what if the purpose of us transitioning is just to live the happiest and most fulfilled life possible, and forcing ourselves into unsafe spaces or denying ourselves access to important resources or cutting ourselves off from important people in our lives or pushing down the more complex parts of our genders would “defeat the purpose of transitioning” for us? what if being able to go where cis men go is just one part of a much bigger journey, not the end goal?
if you really want to talk about “defeating the purpose,” let’s talk about how policing which gendered spaces trans men can access defeats the purpose of trying to stop cis people from policing which gendered spaces trans people can access, because it allows the policing of trans people in gendered spaces to continue in some form instead of eliminating it altogether. let’s talk about how using “evil men invading women’s spaces” rhetoric against trans men defeats the purpose of trying to stop cis people from using it against trans women, because it allows the rhetoric to continue in some form instead of eliminating it altogether.
the point of saying “let people decide which gendered space is right for them” isn’t to make sure everyone uses the one aligned with their “true gender,” it’s to let people do what’s best for them without punishing them for their choice. sometimes the best choice is one that seems wrong from the outside, and you need to learn to live with that.
i just think we as a community need to be more hostile toward people who think upholding the sanctity of a gendered space is more important than giving trans people the freedom to move through the world without being punished for existing in those gendered spaces. that kind of thinking is fucking dangerous and it’s weird as hell that some of y’all are so comfortable with it being directed at us.
moral of the story: stop giving so much of a shit about where a trans man decides to piss or see a doctor or hang out or whatever else. even if you think he doesn’t belong there, he probably has a good reason to be there anyway, and that reason is frankly none of your damn business.
