#but as an autistic person I recognize that rhetoric used to hurt people like me in narc abuse truthers

[howhow326]

Unfriendly reminder that "dark empath Narc abuse truther, slayer of all pwnpd" are not welcomed on my blog, actually.

[inserttemptitlehere]

An unasked for “moderate” take on TERFs v Trans rights

Nobody asked, I might get cancelled for this (probably by both sides), and honestly I don’t have much belief that this will even be read by many people. But it’s frustrating seeing people being condemned for reasonable fears and requests and I just feel the need to put my opinions out into the ether just to have them out there and so I can stop dwelling on them every time I see stuff like this happen again. 

Like, I just want to slap all the TERFs that purposefully misgender people and spout transphobic rhetoric. And I want to shake everyone who labels anything that complains about misogyny specific to cis women as TERF-y. God.

It seems like many “TERFs” are not actively malicious (although many definitely are), but are merely women who’ve been sexually assaulted or just been ground down by the patriarchy and are understandably (although not necessarily justifiably) scared/upset at the thought of any person with a male body coming into their safe spaces or into their fought for institutions. Whereas most trans people just want to live their lives and be accepted as the gender they identify as without wanting to cause any harm to anyone (although again, there are some they definitely do). 

I personally found much of JK Rowling’s recent essay to be fear mongering, but given that she suffered abuse from her husband I could understand and sympathize with why she had those fears even though I disagree with her conclusions about the actions society/government should take regarding them. I honestly just feel sad for her. I feel sad that the experiences she’s been through have made her so scared. I feel sad that despite the millions of dollars she’s donated to charity and work she’s done to make the world a better place she has now hurt so many people and this action will be what she’s remembered for. I feel sad that the extremely angry responses she’s gotten will most likely only solidify her fear and perpetuate her actions that will most likely cause more hurt for more people.

I’ll also say that her original tweet that sparked it all was valid! It is dehumanizing to reduce people to their genitals (ironically something people say TERFs do) and it erases the fact that almost all of these people are targeted because they are women. And it feels somewhat sexist as I’ve never seen an article refer to a certain group as “penis havers” or “semen producers”. I can, however, still see how it would be exclusive however to only refer to “people who menstruate” as “women”. A better wording would’ve been “women and trans men”. Because then no one would be left out. And don’t @ me about that somehow leaving out ‘trans women’, because guess what, there are cis women who don’t menstruate! If we can recognize that “Not all men” is a bad take, why on earth are we accepting “Not all women” as a correct one?

Look, not all cis women menstruate. Not all cis women can or do become pregnant. But we still label these as generic ‘women’s issues’ because they affect a large portion of women. But it should go both ways! I believe that makes the gross femininity trans women need to perform to qualify for hormones a ‘women’s issue’ and the difficulty of getting insurance to cover said hormones a ‘women’s issue’. Because they’re issues that affects a large portion of women. Heck, I know most Transmen find the fact that some TERFs include them in their feminism irritating, but I’m also fine with including specific issues affecting the ones that don’t feel that way as ‘feminist issues’.

I am 100% against misgendering people, am 100% supportive of including trans women’s specific issues as part of the overall fight to help women, and I will happily state “transwomen are women”. But, I do agree that there are a handful of cis women spaces/institutions that it becomes morally grey to accept transwomen into without any sort of provisions. Especially given the fact that if there were absolutely zero strings attached to legally identifying a certain way, then there are definitely cis people who would abuse the system. Personally, I don’t think we should completely structure our society based on these fears - although I can again understand the people who have not had as privileged of a life as I have feeling differently (even if I ultimately disagree with them).

Anyway my take on said spaces/institutions:

Bathrooms: Single parents of opposite sexed kids already use the opposite gendered bathroom to teach them how to use it (and should be allowed to). If a cis man wants to rape you in a bathroom that you’re alone in, I don’t think the societal norms are really going to stop him. And since trans people just want to use the bathroom in peace, let them. Maybe it’s because I’ve never felt comfortable peeing in public and thus never felt the bathroom to be a ‘safe space’, but I’ve never understood the argument against this.

Changing rooms: Go where you identify. If you start acting like a creep, then there should be some course of action to either get you banned or limit your access to said changing room. That policy should hold for cis or trans people.

Women’s support groups: Already made my opinion on this clear I hope. Although I will say that if talk about certain genitalia/bodily functions is triggering, it’s not right to shut down all discussion regarding those things for the other people there. Instead we should have, you know, trigger warnings so that everyone can either prepare themselves accordingly or leave the room and no one is triggered or feels like they are unable to talk about their issues.

Rape shelters: It is 100% valid for a cis woman that was a victim of rape to not want to share their space with someone with a working penis. If there is absolutely nothing that can be done to make said person feel safe, then it should be the right of the shelter to refuse long term stay to the person causing that issue (through no fault of their own) - although the shelter should do everything it can to make sure the trans woman has a place to stay/go. On the other hand, if a trans woman was already there before such a victim, it would not be right to toss out the trans woman to grant access to the cis woman who has the problem with them.

Sports: I personally don’t know enough of the science behind it, but it seems to me that bare minimum they shouldn’t be allowed to compete without doing hormone therapy. And even then the skeletal differences and remaining hormonal differences may still prevent things from being reasonably fair (although I wouldn’t know). It’s definitely not fair to let a trans person pre-hormones compete on the team their gender matches with. Honestly, in an ideal world we’d somehow have an objective way to sort sports into co-ed groups based on athletic ability similar to how weight classes work for wrestling.

Prisons: Non violent crime? Go where you identify. Violent crime? Sorry, gotta go based on your sex (unless you’ve had bottom surgery). It is immoral to lock a convicted rapist with a penis in a cell with women who have no way of getting away from them. I mean, maybe we could have ‘wings’ for trans people so they could go to the prison they identify as and they’d just have separate cells. But until that becomes the norm, the few violent trans criminals should not be allowed to go where they identify.

Kids: Not an institution, but definitely a hot topic. Personally, I think only puberty blockers until they hit adulthood and extensive therapy to make sure that they are in fact trans. Admittedly JK Rowling’s essay about this bit sounded a bit like, “The spooky trans cult is coming for your neurodivergent and gay children!” But it did have small feeling of truth to it as well. As a GNC, cis, autistic woman who had dysphoria as a teen I also worry that I might have been incorrectly diagnosed as trans if I’d been born later. But I don’t think it’s something we as a society need to be extremely worried about or use as an excuse to make things harder on trans kids and adults. We just need to make sure that kids get the therapy they need to sort out whether they’re trans or just having the common dysphoria you have as a teen and chafing against gender roles. We can rubber stamp adults if they want, it’s only kids that should have to go through some minor hoops.

Finally, on being “Gender Critical”. I have to say, the idea of smashing the concept of gender and everybody just living as they are with no societal expectations for them to be one way or another based loosely on their biological sex sounds wonderful. I’m just upset that so many who support this concept are so transphobic because technically in that future there would be no ‘trans’ people (except those that suffer dysphoria) and they feel this gives them the right to act horribly towards trans people. I did recently talk to some TRAs who explained to me that, unlike ‘Gender Critical’ proponents, their ‘gender’ model is split into multiple components. That you’ve got your biological sex (your parts), your gender identity (what you feel you are), your gender presentation (how you dress and act), and gender roles (how society expects you to act based on your gender). So it seems to me, that we can still reach a version of that wonderful future that doesn’t erase people. Smashing gender roles and the idea that there is a ‘correct’ way to present as a gender would achieve ‘female liberation’ while still allowing for people who still desire to identify a certain way. We shouldn’t completely do away with gender, just the things that society expects from it. 

[thisexperimentisvalid]

Day 17- Ableism and Day 15- Harassment (free topic) combined

I’ve never experienced outright ableism, such as people telling me I can’t do something because I’m autistic, or knowing and purposely preying on my triggers. I have been picked on for displaying autistic traits, and I take it upon myself to clear up ignorance surrounding autism, of which there is a lot. I wanted to talk about ignorance and harassment for day 15, but I’m gonna frame it in the context of ableist rhetoric, so here, have this frankenpost.

CW for mention of a panic attack and bullying (non-graphic) and for a long post, press J if you don’t want to read it.

I seriously struggled from ages 11-14 because I was experiencing a lot more stress than I was used to and some autistic traits were starting to come through, immediately signaling to my classmates that I was an outsider. I wasn’t diagnosed and didn’t really know much about autism at the time, so I labeled myself as weird and rolled with it. I pretty much refused to accept that kids were being mean to me. I took everything as a compliment, a friendly tone, a sign of respect. Kids would stop the teacher in the middle of class to point out that I was stimming (rocking and chewing at the time). They made fun of my speech patterns. They’d yell names down the crowded hallway, bring up topics they knew I’d go off on, throw food during lunch because they knew it upset me. I didn’t know they were taking advantage of my lack of social perception. I couldn’t tell they were laughing at me. I took all the bait and thought it was all my fault when I couldn’t sleep because I was stressed, when I developed an extreme startle response, when I cried in the bathroom (what a universal middle school experience). I assumed it was all normal, that none of the adults in my life noticed or ought to intervene. I was wrong.

Looking back, I can see my teachers noticed. My track coach noticed. The lunch monitors noticed. They saw a tween dressing funny and talking oddly and behaving different from the class- not badly, just different- and a bunch of other tweens descending on her like vultures, and they did nothing. They saw me suffocating under the shock and confusion and my peers’ scorn, and they did nothing. There were a few good instances, don’t get me wrong- my French teacher turned a blind eye to me sprinting out mid-panic attack one time, my science teacher let me stay after to re-learn material when I couldn’t focus in class. An English teacher supported my bid for Honors when I was overwhelmed and not performing well on tests, but still trying. But when I was the center of attention? When kids were asking me questions I couldn’t answer about why I acted the way I did? When I just needed a way out, no one was there. No one had advice, or even control of the class, to help me. The kids weren’t harassing me because I was a bad person. They were harassing me because I wasn’t like them. They were harassing me because I was autistic, though none of us knew.

If one of my classmates or teachers or even my parents knew enough to recognize my stimming, my aversion to sensory input, my inability to read social cues. If just one person had paid attention, maybe I would have felt less alone. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to go two more years before diagnosis. Maybe I could have started to accept my identity instead of hating myself for everything I couldn’t change. Ableism wasn’t the problem because no one honed in on what was really going on with me. Ignorance drove all of it. I can’t help but think if they’d known more, I would never have gotten hurt. I know that people can fully clock what’s going on and be cruel anyway, but there would have been less of a problem. Some people weren’t intentionally being jerks. If they’d known they were mocking something that was out of my control, maybe they would have backed off. I don’t regret my middle school self and her choices. At the time, I did what I thought was right. But I didn’t know what I needed, and no one was interested in giving it to me, so I slogged through tests I couldn’t finish on time and environments I couldn’t handle and kids who were the Worst. I suffered because I was different and no one knew how to accommodate that. 

Things are better now. I have a diagnosis. I have a more assertive personality. I don’t put up with ignorance or harassment anymore, whether it’s directed at me or anyone else. I try to educate as many people as I can so they won’t hurt anyone else. I keep trying, even when no one listens, when no one cares, and especially when no one asked. (Like now.) I don’t have better social skills, and the world is going to have to deal with that. I’m nice, quit treating me like dirt.

[mitchellkuga]

Some Libraries Are Facing Backlash Against LGBT Programs — And Holding Their Ground

Published by BuzzFeed News

Recipient of 2019 NLGJA Excellence in Online Journalism Award 

Drag queen storytimes and other LGBT programs are meant to create safe spaces for the queer community. The librarians running them are getting death threats.

On a rainy Thursday afternoon in October, Bella Noche sashayed into the reading room at the North Forest Park library in Queens. She wore a teal wig that matched the color of her sequin top, and strappy gold stilettos. The audience of about 20 children, ages 3–6, and their caretakers erupted in applause. As the noise settled, Bella Noche eased into a chair and read three books, which playfully addressed themes of diversity and acceptance, starting with Julián Is a Mermaid. The picture book by Jessica Love tells the story of a young Latino boy mesmerized by the sight of three women dressed as shimmering mermaids.

“I love mermaids!” yelled one kid after Bella Noche introduced the book’s title.

“I love mermaids more!” yelled another.

“I love mermaids more than anybody!” yelled a third.

Parents chuckled.

“I am a mermaid,” said Bella Noche, who pinned a large, bright orange crab to one side of her hair. “Does that mean you love me?”

“No!”

Bella and the parents laughed. “OK, we’ll work on it.”

Between books, she led animated singalongs, challenging the children to “catch a bubble” — cheeks puffed dramatically, mouths closed — whenever it got too noisy. She concluded the hour with crafts, including excerpts from The Dragtivity Book, a coloring book co-produced by Drag Queen Story Hour and Sez Me, an LGBT web series for kids. The coloring book featured activities like “Find Your Drag Name!” After the event, a librarian told me this was one of the library’s most well-attended storytimes, a particular feat considering the torrential rain.

Author Michelle Tea started Drag Queen Story Hour in 2015, shortly after giving birth to her son Atticus. As a new mother, she suddenly found herself at events like storytimes at her local San Francisco library, which felt welcoming but “really straight,” she said. The writer, who identifies as queer, imagined a storytime that promoted diversity and inclusion, with a pinch of camp — a family event that reflected her own family. “There is just a sort of flair with which queers do anything,” she said. “It's just a certain sense of humor, a sense of the fantastic.” So Tea, in collaboration with RADAR Productions, organized her own fantastic take on storytime at a library in the Castro, one of the country’s most historic LGBT neighborhoods. The concept was simple: a drag queen reading queer-inclusive children’s books to kids. “It was a huge hit,” Tea said, “and then it just spread.”

Today, Drag Queen Story Hour has 27 official chapters in cities ranging from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Bristol, England, and it has inspired countless unofficial offshoots. Readings have taken place at schools, bookstores, and museums but have mostly found a home at public libraries. For Tea, the pairing makes sense. “Librarians are the unsung heroes of our culture,” she said. “They are constantly fighting for our freedom of speech. They are on the front lines.”

Each chapter of Drag Queen Story Hour runs independently through grassroots organizing, but there have been attempts to scale. Last year, the New York chapter established itself as a nonprofit, and it has since received funding from the New York Public Library, Brooklyn Public Library, and two city council members. These resources go toward purchasing books, paying drag queens, and funding training programs — two hour-and-a-half sessions that teach drag queens to talk effectively to children and their parents about gender identity and drag.

“We really wanted to make sure we were presenting an inclusive, open definition of drag,” said Rachel Aimee, a freelance editor who’s the executive director of the New York chapter. “We didn't want to define it as a man dressing up as a woman, because that's not the case for every drag queen and we didn't want to reinforce the gender binary. That's why we felt it was really necessary to make sure everyone was on the same page.”

This mission of inclusivity has inspired other programs. Recently, Aimee started a training program for Drag Queen Story Hour specific to autistic kids, in partnership with the New York Public Library and in collaboration with a friend who runs a blog reviewing books for autistic children.

The program’s expansion has been fueled by high-profile media attention, drawn in part from the wow factor of two seemingly disparate communities converging. “People think librarians wear glasses and ‘shhh’ people all the time and aren't friendly,” said Todd Deck, a member of the American Library Association’s GLBT roundtable. “And people think drag queens are wild and crazy — but the truth is they have so much in common as far as storytelling, community building, imagination. A good children's librarian is really crafty, and I believe a lot of drag queens are pretty good with a hot-glue gun.”

As the program has expanded to more conservative parts of the country, drag queen storytimes have been thrust into the crosshairs of the culture wars. Protestors have gathered outside of libraries in Mobile, Alabama; Columbus, Georgia; and Port Jefferson, New York, with Alex Jones and other right-wing shock jocks condemning the program. For the most part, attacks on programs like the Drag Queen Story Hour have been scattershot attempts from religious groups or lone zealots — like an Iowa man who recently filmed himself burning LGBT-inclusive library books by a lake — who’ve been far outnumbered by supporters, and events have proceeded as planned.

But in Lafayette, Louisiana, backlash against the program has proven effective. In September, both Lafayette Public Library and Lafayette Community College indefinitely “postponed” a drag queen storytime, citing safety concerns. The library had received pressure to cancel the event from Joel Robideaux, a top Lafayette official — and lawsuits filed by Warriors for Christ and Special Forces of Liberty alleged that the Lafayette Public Library violated the First Amendment by promoting “human secularism”; following that logic, if public libraries hosted drag queens, they should also permit room rentals for all religious groups. The person spearheading the lawsuit, Chris Sevier — who previously sued the state of Alabama to legally recognize his marriage to his laptop — framed the lawsuits as a matter of equity, not hate. “Our objection is not against the LGBTQ community,” he said. “It is against the library’s actions.”

Aside from unfounded and bigoted concerns that drag queens are predators thrusting children into a state of gender confusion and homosexuality, attacks against drag queen storytime have stirred debates about library neutrality and what responsibilities a tax-funded civic institution has in serving its community. In July, this debate reached a fever pitch when the American Library Association introduced a revised interpretation to its Bill of Rights, stating that if libraries rent meeting rooms to charities and nonprofits, it cannot exclude “hate groups from discussing their activities in the same facilities.” (A representative from the American Library Association said the revision was “not connected” to Drag Queen Story Hour.) Outcry erupted, and ALA’s council has since rescinded the revision.

At the heart of the debate is a central question that has challenged the library community for decades: What is the role of a library?

Public libraries as we know it have always contained the promise of democracy — institutions tasked with connecting all people to a wealth of information, free of charge. When Scottish American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie funded the construction of over 2,500 libraries at the turn of the 20th century, he imagined a space that would "bring books and information to all people.” He also waxed poetic: “There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.”

For their part, librarians have looked to the American Library Association’s Bill of Rights, which emphasizes the values of equity and access, best summed up by this statement from library consultant Matt Finch: “Libraries are innately subversive institutions born of the radical notion that every single member of society deserves free, high-quality access to knowledge and culture.”

But by virtue of existing in America, public libraries have historically failed to live up to this promise. When public libraries began proliferating in the South, African Americans were denied access by laws that weren’t formally overturned until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Discrimination also affected libraries at their most “objective”: Under the Dewey Decimal Classification system, used in over 135 countries, LGBT nonfiction was classified next to books on incest and sexual bondage, in sections titled “mental illness” and “abnormal sex relations.” This wasn’t amended until 1996. Under its new heading, “sexual relations,” the books are shelved next to books about sex work, suggesting that sex is the defining aspect of the lives of LGBT people.

Within the fantasy of the library as a democratic third space, librarians are tasked with being objective civil servants, a notion that rankles many in the field. In library school, “a lot of us get fed the line that libraries are neutral, which is a very dangerous and inaccurate piece of rhetoric to give librarians,” said Ingrid Conley-Abrams, a school librarian who previously worked at the Brooklyn Public Library for over seven years. “Every program we offer or don't offer, every book we shelve or don't shelve, is a stance. So this notion that libraries are neutral is hurtful nonsense. Libraries, as long as they are run by human beings, will always have some sort of mission.”

The Task Force on Gay Liberation was founded in 1970, a year after the Stonewall riots, by librarians Janet Cooper and Israel Fishman. The next year, they threw a party at the American Library Association’s annual conference in Dallas that featured a “Hug a Homosexual” kissing booth, a radical (for its time) attention-grabbing stunt that proclaimed gay people’s existence to the library world. The task force, which has since been integrated into the ALA as the GLBT Round Table, fought to make libraries more inclusive for gay and lesbian library users, creating gay and lesbian bibliographies and combating discrimination against gay and lesbian librarians, who sometimes risked losing their jobs when coming out.

In light of the current political moment, librarians across the country are expanding that fight, with an uptick in drag queen storytimes and other queer-inclusive programming to send the signal that libraries are safe spaces for marginalized people. But some librarians said that these events, for all their messages of inclusivity, are not enough.

“If the drag queen needs to use the bathroom at your library after their reading, are they going to have trouble accessing a toilet?” asked Conley-Abrams, stressing that she is “100% in favor of drag queen storytime” but noticed that some libraries were using the program as a stand-in for the quieter, but just as important, work of affirming queer library users — like abolishing gender-segregated bathrooms and library card applications. “If you've got ‘male,’ ‘female,’ and ‘other’ [on your application], you're literally othering queer people, which is not a good look,” she said.

Many of the librarians I spoke to emphasized the importance of visually proclaiming libraries as safe spaces by developing a diverse selection of LGBT-inclusive books in easy-to-access areas, building extravagant displays for PRIDE month — “You couldn't walk anywhere without being knocked out by a quote from Harvey Milk,” said Conley-Abrams — and organizing community groups like queer book clubs, gay-straight alliances, and teen pride parties.

But in more conservative parts of the country, where attacks against drag queen storytimes have been most aggressive, creating a safe space for queer library users can be an act of discretion. Todd Deck, a librarian at the rural Tehama County Library, three hours north of Sacramento, said that community bulletin boards advertising queer-friendly events — typically placed in prominent areas in urban libraries — are most effective in areas of his library with less foot traffic, particularly for LGBT youth. He also emphasized the privacy afforded by self-checkout machines in small towns where “maybe your mom is best friends with the clerk.” “In a rural space, most likely everybody is connected in really beautiful but also really tricky ways,” he said.

Caring for LGBT youth can sometimes mean caring for people who are experiencing homelessness; they are 120% more likely to experience it than their non-LGBT peers. Julie Ann Winkelstein, a professor at the University of Tennessee who specializes in libraries as safer spaces for LGBT youth experiencing homelessness, stressed the vital role that libraries play in the lives of a particularly underserved demographic. Beyond loaning books, Winkelstein said LGBT youth experiencing homelessness are in need of other vital resources that libraries offer but are seldom recognized for: a sense of community, shelter from extreme weather, and access to resources for employment, housing, legal advice, and social workers.

“You have young people coming in who are carrying a huge amount of trauma — they need to be in an environment where at least it's not expanding on their trauma,” said Winkelstein. “They need to be in a place where they don't see something that feels anti-queer or anti-homeless,” which includes an excessive amount of negative signage — “It’s very triggering for a young person who already experiences a heck of a lot of ‘no’s’ outside of the library” — uniformed security guards, and address requirements for a library card.

Above all, librarians who identified as LGBT stressed the importance of being out at work. This can be communicated through accessories like queer-affirming pronoun buttons — “I'm not really a big button person, but some librarians are obsessed with them,” Deck said — rainbow pins, and bracelets. But mostly it’s about being confident in your own skin.

“The best thing you can do for kids is to be yourself as confidently as possible, which I know sounds really cheesy, but it's very, very true,” said Conley-Abrams, whose hair, cut short on the sides, is dyed a pinkish orange. “Because kids can't be it unless they see it, and kids have to see that there is a place for them in the world. And if they're just seeing homogeny they may worry that they have to completely change themselves in order to just be in the world, which is really scary. I am a symbol of someone who doesn't really look like other people at school but I still have a job and I'm a happy person and I found a place. And even if they're not just like me maybe I'll remind them that they'll have their place too.”

In May, when librarian Jennifer Stickles announced an event at the Olean Public Library, in a rural part of western New York, called Drag Queen Kids’ Party, she anticipated some pushback. The head of youth and adult programming wasn’t naive about the politics of Olean, which voted heavily in favor of President Trump. “We knew that there was going to be a few people who would call and complain,” she said. “We didn't know it was going to get as bad as it got.”

A post from the library’s Facebook page explaining the event — “teaching the children about acceptance, gender stereotypes, and that being different isn't a bad thing” — went viral locally and attracted a flood of negative comments, some of which, Stickles said, equated the program with rape and threatened to burn down the library. For weeks leading up to the event, the post galvanized conservatives: A local pastor barged into the library and told Stickles that she would burn in hell; people called the library saying that she shouldn’t be allowed to work with children because she identifies as queer; and neo-Nazi Daniel Burnside announced that the National Socialist Movement would be protesting the event. Stickles said that when she called the police department to organize security, they advised her to cancel the event.

The day before Drag Queen Kids’ Party, a local reporter called Stickles to ask about the death threats issued against her — threats that she was unaware of. After hanging up the phone, she stood alone in her office overlooking the parking lot. “The walk between my office to my boss's office is the only time I thought for a split second like maybe I should reconsider,” she said. After talking it over with the library director, Michelle La Voie, Stickles made her decision: “I have to. There's no way I'm calling it off.”

After a night of tossing and turning — “I got an hour and a half of sleep. I was so nervous. It had just gotten to be too much,” she said — Stickles pulled up to the library, bracing for a scene. What she encountered shocked her.

“Just rainbows everywhere,” she recalled. Over 200 supporters flooded the front lawn of the library, many of whom arrived three hours before the event to deter protestors, including a group of drag queens who drove down from Buffalo. They waved pride flags and held signs advocating acceptance and diversity. Protestors, for their part, amounted to “mostly little old ladies from church,” said Stickles, and neo-Nazis who stayed in their vehicles and drove around the library yelling obscenities. Inside, over 70 children and their parents crammed into a reading room to watch Flo Leeta read two books and lip-synch songs from “Frozen.”

Two weeks later, connections fostered at the library led to Olean’s first public Pride event: a picnic in the local park. About 100 people showed up. “I've never been around so many gay people in Olean,” Stickles said. “We're doing our best to keep the momentum going and make the whole community more inclusive.” A few people from the picnic started a group called Cattaraugus County Pride Coalition, and they’ve already discussed securing a permit for Olean’s first ever Pride parade, in 2019.

It was an unexpected outcome but one that Stickles sees as integral to her role as a librarian. “That’s the job of the public library,” she said, “to fill a need when we see it, you know?”

Backlash against programs like Drag Queen Story Hour have cast libraries as dynamic centers for civic progress, inadvertently reanimating conversations about who tax-funded institutions are responsible for serving — if the library is really for everyone, does that include hate groups? — and spotlighting the role of librarians as stewards of access and inclusion, a role that many have double-downed on since the election of President Trump.

“It's more an act of rebellion than it was before,” said Michelle Tea. “Under Obama, [Drag Queen Story Hour] just seemed like a really fun program to do — it was just fun — and it still is that, especially for the kids, but I think that one of the reasons why it is so popular right now is people are looking for things to support in space of what is happening to our culture, where so much hate is being emboldened.”

In Queens, as kids colored pages from The Dragtivity Book, Bella Noche stood to the side and reflected on the crowd, which seemed distracted at times. “This is a genuine audience,” she said. “If they're not interested, they will not hesitate to ignore you. It's cool winning over an audience of children, but also their parents — they’re protective over their kids. Their kids are the whole reason why they're here.”

She recounted an interaction with a mother after one of her readings. The mother’s son of about 7 years old approached her excitedly: “Mommy, Mommy, I know what I want to be,” he said. “When I grow up, I want to be a drag queen mermaid, too.”

📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚

 Photo by Eugénie Baccot.  

[gnomeskillet]

I apologize if my tone reads as aggressive; mostly, I just felt incredulous. To me, asking “why are TERFS like that?” is about the same as “why are racists like that?” Or honestly, most other social phobias. And with the way you talk about shame and desire to be like other women makes me feel like you’re *so close* to getting it, but I’m not-

Bear with me, I’m autistic, so words are hard, and sometimes, getting my thoughts in order is like herding cats, but as a transperson, I do actually do my best to keep a cautious eye on TERF ideology and practices so that I can, you know. Know and recognize the stuff that might get hurled at me.

To start with, Reason And Empathy’s remark that TERFs don’t mind palling around with Nazi’s is 100% correct. In today’s political climate, a lot of TERF ideology is based in western white women’s standards of womanhood, and at this point, they are basically another flavor of white supremacists. You say that today’s TERFs are weird compared to ten years ago, but like- to be quite frank, I view it as a natural progression. Hate breeds hate, and as POC and trans people gain more and more rights, their fear becomes louder and more panicked.

And the thing is, once you buy into a lie - such as “the trans people are going to assault women and take away our rights” - it does become easier to just. Keep believing that. Examining what you believe and why takes a lot of work! You have to want to change, but when you’re buried deep in an echo chamber of angry, hateful people, changing is terrifying. It’s like a cult mentality; the loudest voices in these groups want their peers to continue to agree with them and they will use bullying and fear tactics to keep people on their side.

They also go after vulnerable people, like teenagers and victims of assault. That’s part of how they got their hooks into JK Rowling; when trans people got mad at her for expressing ignorant beliefs, the TERFs spoke up and said “you’re right and you should say it.” They stood by her and supported her, and in return, she supports them. They prey on the ignorance of teenagers who might not have a way into the Queer community outside of the internet and don’t yet have the life experience to really analyze the rhetoric they’re being fed.

In the grand scheme of things, there’s not one flaw or vulnerability that makes someone fall for TERF ideology; it’s a lot of different insecurities. It’s the shame that you personally experienced, for others it’s the fear of men, or it’s ignorance, or it’s wanting to fit in or feel special. It’s the same reason men become incels. They experience shame, they feel hurt and threatened by women, they’re ignorant, and they want to fit in and feel special. 

Yeah, you’re right, it DOES take a lot of work to believe in these sort of mindsets. You have to constantly be posturing, watching to see what other people are doing, making sure you’re using the correct language and all that fun, exhausting stuff. But to stop, you risk losing your community, your support network, your sense of security, you could be attacked and punished by the people you once called friends, and…

What if they’re right? What if you leave the group, and it turns out that Trans/Women/BIPOC really are the enemy and they hurt you? Do you really want to risk making yourself vulnerable like that?

So even if it is easier to accept a transperson at face value, letting go of the hate, the fear, and the shame is so much more difficult because you still have to put effort into unlearning your beliefs and building trust in other people. You have to cut ties with the people who told you you were good, you were special, you were pure and reach out to people who… will probably resent you and view you with distrust. Not everyone has the fortitude to do that. 

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, but at least doing it means that you know there are other people who support you. Isn’t it safer to stick to the devil you know?

So I reiterate; it’s fear and ignorance that largely drives people to radical ideologies, and it’s fear that keeps them there. To me, it sounds as if you were pushed out enough to realize that you actually had nothing to fear, but not everyone experiences that. For a lot of TERFS, they start out afraid and other TERFs keep feeding that fear until it’s all they have left to cling to.

For them, it’s easier to be afraid than to face the thing they’re afraid of.

You know, the thing I don’t get about terfs is… what do you actually lose by taking a trans person at face value? Like… believing they are a big conspiracy seems to take work: Who are they? How do they organize? Why? When?

Where believing “I was sad and thought maybe I should try taking estrogen and I’d feel better and lo and behold i was right” is… there’s so much less you have to guess about.

Why is it worth so much effort, to the point of palling around with Nazis, to believe something else?