beks21

[beks21]

official elon musk hate post reblog to hate like to hate reply to hate

[beks21]

[beks21]

[beks21]

[beks21]

My sister sent me this photo today with zero context and I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe

[beks21]

[beks21]

Destroy the myth that libraries are no longer relevant. If you use your library, please reblog.

[beks21]

i'll do it for sam

[beks21]

On the issue of the ‘q slur’...

So, yesterday, I got into a rather stupid internet argument with someone who was peddling what seemed to me to be a rather insidious narrative about slur-reclamation. Someone in the ensuing notes raised a point which I thought was interesting, and worrying, and probably needed to be addressed in it’s own post. So here we go:

The word ‘queer’ itself seems to be especially touchy for many, so let me begin to address this by way of analogy.

Instead of talking about “queer”, let’s start by talking about “Jew” - a word which I believe is very similar in its usage in some significant ways.

Now, the word “Jew” has been used as a derogatory term for literally hundreds of years. It is used both as a noun (eg. “That guy ripped me off - what a dirty Jew”) and as a verb (eg. “That guy really Jew-ed me”). These usages are deeply, fundamentally, horrifically offensive, and should be used under no circumstances, ever. And yet, I myself have heard both, even as recently as this past year, even in an urban location with plenty of Jews, in a social situation where people should have known better. In short – the word “Jew”, as it is used by certain antisemites, is – quite unambiguously – a slur. Not a dead slur, not a former slur – and active, living slur that most Jews will at some point in their life encounter in a context where the term is being used to denigrate them and their religion. 

Now here’s the thing, though: I’m a Jew. I call myself a Jew. I prefer that all non-Jews call me a Jew – so do most Jews I know. “Jew” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Judaism, the same way that “Muslim” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Islam, and “Christian” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Christianity. 

In fact, almost all of the terms that non-Jews use to avoid saying “Jew” (eg. “a member of the Jewish persuasion”, “a follower of the Jewish faith”, “coming from a Jewish family”, “identifying as part of the Jewish religion”, etc) are deeply offensive, because these terms imply to us that the speaker sees the term “Jew” (and by extension, what that term stands for) as a dirty word.

“BUT WAIT” – I hear you say – “didn’t you just say that Jew is used as a slur?!?”

Yes. Yes, I did. And also, it is fundamentally offensive not to call us that, because it is our name and our identity.

Let me back up a little bit, and bring you into the world of one of those 2000s PSAs about not using “that’s so gay”. Think of some word that is your identity – something which you consider to be a fundamental and intrinsic part of yourself. It could be “female” or “male”, or “Black” or “white”, “tall” or “short”, “Atheist” or “Mormon” or “Evangelical” – you name it.

Now imagine that people started using that term as a slur.

“What a female thing to do!” they might say. “That teacher doesn’t know anything, he’s so female!”

Or maybe, “Yikes, look at that idiot who’s driving like an atheist. It’s so embarrassing!”

Or perhaps, “Oh gross, that music is so Black, turn it off!”

Now, what would you say if the same groups of people who had been saying those things for years turned around and avoided using those words to describe anything other than an insult?

“Oh, so I see you’re a member of the female persuasion!”

“Is he… a follower of the atheist beliefs? Like does he identify as part of the community of atheist-aligned individuals?”

“So, as a Black-ish identified person yourself – excuse me, as a person who comes from a Black-ish family…”

Here’s the fundamental problem with treating all words that are used as slurs the same, without any regard for how they are used and how they developed – not all slurs are the same.

No one, and I mean no one (except maybe for a small handful of angsty teens who are deliberately making a point of being edgy) self-identifies as a kike. In contrast, essentially all Jews self-identify as Jews. And when non-Jews get weird about that identity on the grounds that “Jew is used as a slur”, despite the fact that it is the name that the Jewish community as a whole resoundingly identifies with, what they are basically saying is that they think that the slur usage is more important than the Jewish community self-identification usage. They are saying, in essence, “we think that your name should be a slur.” 

Now, at the top I said that the word “Jew” and the word “queer” had some significant similarities in terms of their usage, and I think that’s pretty apparent if you look at what people in those communities are saying about those terms. When American Jews were being actively threatened by neo-Nazis in the 70s, the slogan of choice was “For every Jew a .22!″. When the American Queer community was marching in the 90s in protest of systemic anti-queer violence, the slogan of choice was “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” Clearly, these are terms that are used by the communities themselves, in reference to themselves. Clearly, these terms are more than simply slurs.

But while there are useful similarities between how the terms “Jew” and “Queer” are used by bigots and by their own communities, I’d also like to point out that there is pretty substantial and important difference:

Unlike for “queer”, there is no organized group of Jewish antisemites who are using the catchphrase “Jew is a slur!” in order to selectively silence and disenfranchise Jews who are part of minority groups within Judaism. 

This is the real rub with the term queer – no one was campaigning about it being a slur until less than a decade ago. No one was saying that you needed to warn for the word queer when queer people were establishing the academic discipline of queer studies. No one was ‘think of the children”-ing the umbrella term when queer activists were literally marching for their lives. Go back to even 2010 and the term “q slur” would have been basically unparseable – if I saw someone tag something “q slur”, like most queer people I would have wracked my brains trying to figure out what slur even started with q, and if I learned that it was supposed to be “queer”, my default assumption would be that the post was made by a well-meaning but extremely clueless straight person.

I literally remember this shift – and I remember who started it. Exclusionists didn’t like the fact that queer was an umbrella term. Terfs (or radfems as they like to be called now) didn’t like that queer history included trans history; biphobes and aphobes didn’t like that the queer community was also a community to bisexuals and asexuals. And so what could they possibly say, to drive people away from the term that was protecting the sorts of queer people that they wanted to exclude?

Well, naturally, they turned to “queer is a slur.”

And here’s the thing – queer is a slur, just like Jew is a slur, and no one is denying that. And that fact makes “queer is a slur so don’t use it” a very convincing argument on the surface: 1) queer is still often used as a slur, and 2) you shouldn’t ever use slurs without carefully tagging and warning people about them (and better yet, you should never use them at all), and so therefore 3) you need to tag for “the q slur” and you need to warn people not to call the community “the queer community” or it’s members “queer people” or its study “queer studies” – because it’s a slur!

But the crucial step that’s missing here is exactly the same one above, for the word “Jew” – and that step is that not all slurs are the same. When a term is both used as a slur and used as a self-identity term, then favoring the slur meaning instead of the identity meaning is picking the side of the slur-users over the disadvantaged group! 

If you say or tag “q slur” you are sending the message, whether you realize it or not, that people who use “queer” as a slur are more right about its meaning than those who use it as their identity. Tagging for “queer” is one thing. People can filter for “queer” if it triggers them, just like people can filter for anything else. Not everyone has to personally use the term queer, or like the term queer. But there is no circumstance where the term “q slur” does not indicate that you think queer is more of a slur than of an accurate description of a community.

If I, as a Jew, ever came across a post where someone had warned for innocent, positive, non-antisemitic content relating to Judaism with the tag “J slur”, I would be incensed. So would any Jew. The act of tagging a post “J slur” is in and of itself antisemitic and offensive.

Queer people are allowed to feel the same about “q slur”. It is not a neutral warning term – it is an attack on our identity.

[beks21]

If you are a British/UK citizen, there is currently a petition running (with only 125 signatures) that ends in June 2025. The petition calls for the government to make it so that you do not need a diagnosis of gender dysphoria to change your gender.

If you are a British/UK citizen, and would like to sign:

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/701159

If you're not a British/ UK citizen it'd be much appreciated if you could share this post !! :)

[beks21]

The first time I heard the word ‘lesbian’, I was 9 years old.

A group of girls were saying that the new girl in our class was a lesbian. They said it in a hushed whisper, the same way you’d say a swear word. Noses wrinkled, eyes glinting, mouths twisted in disgust.

I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew that it was bad.

Some time after that, I found out what it meant, and I remember, vividly, the drop in my stomach when I realised that there was another option - that I didn’t have to live with a boy when I grew up after all, I could just live with my best friend instead. Hold hands with her. Be with her, like that.

I also remember the sinking feeling when I realised that it wasn’t something I was supposed to want.

After that, every game of Barbie I ever played, Legos, any toy, would have a lesbian storyline - but only if I was playing by myself. I wanted to see it, to make it real and not just something whispered in hushed tones as an insult, and I’d press my Barbies faces together and make them kiss and wonder, wonder, wonder, if this was real, if this was a thing two women actually did.

I used to lie in bed at night and wonder if everyone felt like this.

The year after that, I remember overhearing my parents talking about a kiss between two men that was going to be shown on a popular British soap. My dad said he couldn’t believe they would put ‘something like that’ on TV before the watershed.

The night it was on, I crept downstairs and peeked through the railings on the stairs and watched the kiss. It was the first time I’d seen any people of the same sex interact romantically, and it was met with noises of disgust from both of my parents. I, however, was transfixed. It was real.

It was real… and oh, how my heart sang!!

For a few seconds at least, before I noticed my parents reactions over the loud thumping of my own heart. Their repulsion. Their hissed words.

I went back to bed, and stared at the ceiling.

That was the night I stopped playing out my romantic fantasies with my toys OR in my mind, squashed it all into a little box and tried very, very hard not to be that.

And for years, I succeeded. I pretended to have crushes on members of boybands, gossiped with friends about who I thought was ‘cute’ and ignored how my heart fluttered when one friend in particular let me brush and braid her hair. When we got to the age where we all started mixing with boys our own age, I agreed to go on dates (ie holding hands at the local macdonalds and going for a walk by the river) with anyone who asked, and I would agree to be their girlfriend until it got to the point they wanted to touch me or do more than peck me on the lips and I’d break up with them in a panic, telling myself that they just weren’t ‘the right one’ or that I ‘wasn’t ready’.

I’d still only ever heard the word lesbian in the context of something you shouldn’t be.

At the time, there was a statistic being bandied around by some people in my class (goodness knows where it came from) that 1 in 10 people were gay, and they were all trying to guess which three out of our class were lesbians. And I remember sitting there, feeling my cheeks getting warm and my stomach churning and realising, in that moment, that it might be me.

It might be me.

And I wanted to die.

I dont need to talk any more about that, or the rest of my journey - but I’d like to tell you now about my own child. My oldest.

At nine years old, my son called to me through the bathroom door whilst I was on the loo. “By the way, mum, D is my boyfriend now.”

It wasn’t an unexpected moment - my child had worn dresses and carried dolls and only ever been friends with girls and expressed their desire to be a girl from a very early age - but it wasn’t quite the moment I had envisioned it being. Not with me sitting on the toilet, and definitely a few years earlier than I’d expected it to happen!

But they had told me who they were, and after getting off the toilet, I hugged them and thanked them for telling me, and they said “I know what the word is, mum, the word is gay and it’s okay.”

I had to go and have a little cry after that.

The word is gay and it’s okay.

How powerful those words are, and how different my child’s experience of that word was to mine.

Do you want to know what the difference was between their childhood and mine?

Since my children were young, they had books that had stories with two mums, or two dads… single parents, nonbinary parents - all manner of configurations and love. They saw it on television. They heard their mother talk about her gay friends, went to a lesbian wedding, and if their mother ever referred to a future for them, never specified the gender of any future partner - or, indeed, implied they should have a partner at all.

My child never, at any point in their life, thought that being gay was something they shouldn’t be.

The same could be said when a year later they told me they were nonbinary, and we celebrated their new pronouns and identity with cake and a Doctor Who marathon. They never had any doubt in their mind that I would be anything other than accepting, loving and embracing - and it means the world to me.

I wrote this out mostly for me, because it’s been on my mind - but also to say that it fucking matters. That representation matters. That all those people who say they “don’t mind it but don’t need it being shoved in their face” and who get their knickers in a twist over a Pride parade and complain about gay people being all over mainstream media need to understand that it DOES matter. That it NEEDS to happen. To be visible.

Because it means my child gets to grow up in a world where it never crossed their mind that their gender or sexuality might not be okay. They grew up knowing they were unconditionally loved for whoever they were.

I want that for every child.

I can’t go back in time and undo all the damage done to the little girl playing so quietly in her room, afraid of herself, afraid of the world, growing up to believe that the tenderest parts of her were unlovable.

But I can try to help create a world where nobody else has to feel that way, ever again.

[beks21]

Does this count as finding a walrus at your door?

[beks21]

[beks21]

ur future nurse is using chapgpt to glide thru school u better take care of urself

[beks21]

trump dies of congestive heart failure before being sworn in charge to like cast to reblog

[beks21]