#for marginalized communities

[findingavoiceif]

My heart goes out to everyone affected by the recent news in America. Although I’m not living there, I can feel the weight that so many people must be carrying right now. For many, this moment brings an overwhelming mix of fear, worry, and exhaustion, especially for those who feel vulnerable or uncertain about what the future may hold.

I know that for many, these changes go far beyond politics—they reach deeply into the personal lives and sense of safety for countless individuals. People who already feel marginalized may be wondering what this means for their rights, their voices, and their place in society. It’s heartbreaking to imagine the fear and anxiety some must feel, simply because of who they are or where they come from. It’s difficult to live under the weight of constant questions about belonging and value, and I truly sympathize with everyone trying to navigate these feelings.

Even though I’m watching from afar, I want everyone who’s feeling this weight to know that they are not alone. There is a world of people out here who care, who understand that this moment is hard, and who want to stand in support of everyone feeling the strain. These times can be so isolating, but I hope that togetherness and community can offer some comfort and help each of you feel seen and valued, just as you are.

Please, take care of yourselves as best as you can, and know that there are so many people who care about your well-being. I’m sending all my love, strength, and compassion. You deserve to feel safe, valued, and supported. <3

[sunbeamedskies]

If you see articles and tweets about how the Star of David is now a symbol of fascism and think to yourself "maybe they have a point," then whatever you define as your antizionism has absolutely crossed the line into antisemitism

The Star of David is one of the most important symbols in Judaism. The fact that it is on the flag of Israel does not make it fascist. The government of Israel is separate from the symbol. Labeling such a widely used symbol by a marginalized people as fascist is incredibly dangerous and seeks to conflate Jews as a whole with the Israeli government- something antizionists continually claim people shouldn't do. So why are some doing it?

High control groups slowly ease you into believing nonsensical things. They provide "reasoning" and "logic" which goes largely unchallenged within echo chambers. People in these echo chambers are prone to believing it because they start to see it as real logic instead of bigoted, twisted reasoning. Even otherwise intelligent people can fall for their prejudices as they begin to view it as a form of justice

It is a fantasy that high control group leaders go from 0 to 100 in five minutes or refuse to answer any questions- they are usually much more manipulative

Please confront your biases. The Jews are tired

[makingqueerhistory]

I’m actually serious about this, if at all possible, right now is a very good time to request queer books from your local library. Whether they get them or not is not in your control, but it is so important to show that there is a desire for queer books. I will also say getting more queer books in libraries and supporting queer authors are pretty fantastic byproducts of any action.

This isn’t something everyone can do, but please do see if you are one of the people who has the privilege to engage in this form of activism, and if you are, leverage that privilege for all you’re worth.

For anyone who can’t think of a queer book to request, here is a little list of some queer books that I think are underrated and might not be in circulation even at larger libraries:

Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture by Sherronda J. Brown

Silver Under Nightfall by Rin Chupeco     

Harvard's Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals by William Wright    

The Perks of Loving a Wallflower by Erica Ridley   

God Themselves by Jae Nichelle

IRL by Tommy Pico        

The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World's Queer Frontiers by Mark Gevisser

Passing Strange by Ellen Klages             

The New Queer Conscience by Adam Eli

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom          

Queering the Tarot by Cassandra Snow              

Wash Day Diaries by Jamila Rowser

Queer Magic: Lgbt+ Spirituality and Culture from Around the World by Tomás Prower            

Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam   

Beyond the Pale by Elana Dykewomon 

Hi Honey, I'm Homo! by Matt Baume      

The Deep by Rivers Solomon

Homie: Poems by Danez Smith

The Secret Life of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw  

The Companion by E.E. Ottoman 

Kapaemahu by Dean Hamer, Joe Wilson, Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu

Sacrament of Bodies by Romeo Oriogun     

Witching Moon by Poppy Woods 

Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt    

Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman    

Disintegrate/Dissociate by Arielle Twist           

Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir by Akwaeke Emezi             

Peaches and Honey by Imogen Markwell-Tweed      

Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color by Christopher Soto

[reasonsforhope]

People ask me sometimes how I'm so confident that we can beat climate change.

There are a lot of reasons, but here's a major one: it would take a really, really long time for Earth to genuinely become uninhabitable for humans.

Humans have, throughout history, carved out a living for themselves in some of the most harsh, uninhabitable corners of the world. The Arctic Circle. The Sahara. The peaks of the Himalayas. The densest, most tropical regions of the Amazon Rainforest. The Australian Outback. etc. etc.

Frankly, if there had been a land bridge to Antarctica, I'm pretty sure we would have been living there for thousands of years, too. And in fact, there are humans living in Antarctica now, albeit not permanently.

And now, we're not even facing down apocalypse, anymore. Here's a 2022 quote from the author of The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells, a leader on climate change and the furthest thing from a climate optimist:

"The most terrifying predictions [have been] made improbable by decarbonization and the most hopeful ones practically foreclosed by tragic delay. The window of possible climate futures is narrowing, and as a result, we are getting a clearer sense of what’s to come: a new world, full of disruption but also billions of people, well past climate normal and yet mercifully short of true climate apocalypse. Over the last several months, I’ve had dozens of conversations — with climate scientists and economists and policymakers, advocates and activists and novelists and philosophers — about that new world and the ways we might conceptualize it. Perhaps the most capacious and galvanizing account is one I heard from Kate Marvel of NASA, a lead chapter author on the fifth National Climate Assessment: “The world will be what we make it.”" -David Wallace-Wells for the New York Times, October 26, 2022

If we can adapt to some of the harshest climates on the planet - if we could adapt to them thousands of years ago, without any hint of modern technology - then I have every faith that we can adjust to the world that is coming.

What matters now is how fast we can change, because there is a wide, wide gap between "climate apocalypse" and "no harm done." We've already passed no harm done; the climate disasters are here, and they've been here. People have died from climate disasters already, especially in the Global South, and that will keep happening.

But as long as we stay alive - as long as we keep each other alive - we will have centuries to fix the effects of climate change, as much as we possibly can.

And looking at how far we've come in the past two decades alone - in the past five years alone - I genuinely think it is inevitable that we will overcome climate change.

So, we're going to survive climate change, as a species.

What matters now is making sure that every possible individual human survives climate change as well.

What matters now is cutting emissions and reinventing the world as quickly as we possibly can.

What matters now is saving every life and livelihood and way of life that we possibly can.

[inkskinned]

100,000 dollars is not a lot of money.

it is also a lot more money than i will ever have. my student loans make up half of that - they're coming back, i'm told, like we all bounced back recently. the other day while paying for gas to go to work, i overdrew my account without knowing it.

i sat in the car and looked at the charge and tried to do the math. where the fuck is the money even going? i don't live extravagantly. i live in a hole in the ground, in an apartment the size of a sneeze; covered in ants. yes, i wanted to live close to a population center. maybe that's my fault. i've downloaded the apps and i've spoken to the experts and i've cut back on excess. i can't help the pharmacy bills or the medical debt.

i have a good, well-paying job. when i googled it to see if i was getting a fair salary, i found out i'd be making "upper middle class" money. which doesn't make sense - is "upper middle class" now just "able to afford a one-bedroom without a roommate". when i was younger, upper-middle meant a nice big house and a backyard and vacations and not flinching about eating at a resturant.

i was talking to my friend who is a realtor. he said 100,000 dollars is extremely cheap for housing. he's not wrong. 100,000 dollars would change my life. 100,000 dollars also won't really buy you anything. it could get you out of debt, potentially, if you were lucky and had a certain amount of scholarships to tack onto your degree. you could pay off the car and then have enough left over for "spending" money. how fucking amazing. one vacation, maybe two if you're thrifty. and then - like magic - the money would evaporate into nothing. people would sigh and tell you see, you should have put it into savings! like "upper middle class" people can't afford to value "actually living" over squirrelling wealth. you should spend your life only in scarcity. like that is what made the rich people all their real "actually a lot of money".

100,000 dollars would literally set me free. it also would just set me back to "earning normally" instead of paying down debt into infinity. god, do you know how many of us just want that? that our first thought is we could stop scrambling and just be free of debt if we won the lottery? that we don't even necessarily need to stop working - we just wouldn't have to worry about failing or falling?

and. at the same time. 100,000 dollars is next to fucking nothing.

[alwaysbewoke]

[heckacentipede]

small reminder this pride season that in the natural world you will find examples of animals changing their sex [such as the peacocks, or those lions], or being multiple sexes [such as bilateral gynandromorphs], or similarly being what you want to call "naturally nonbinary" or "naturally trans".

it's fun to use these wonderful creatures as trans and nonbinary iconography, but please! don't forget your intersex siblings in your excitement. those are intersex animals, not trans or nonbinary

sincerely, a perisex bigender constantly bummed at the missed opportunity for cool pride art

[baeddling]

People not grasping what "trans men hold power over trans women" means is probably the most frustrating part of talking abt intracommunity transmisogyny

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

Last week, Johnson & Johnson agreed not to enforce their secondary patents on bedaquiline in most countries after a long public pressure campaign by TB activists around the world.

(A special shoutout to Nandita Venkatesan and Phumeza Tisilethe, the two women who led the charge to prevent the patent evergreening in India, which is the only reason generic bedaquiline is in production.)

But the problem of patent evergreening is everywhere--as this NYT story reports, Gilead intentionally denied people access to a drug they knew to be less toxic than alternatives because it wanted to extend its monopoly on HIV drugs for as long as possible.

Similarly, Johnson & Johnson has been intentionally denying people access to affordable bedaquiline, even though they knew they could make a profit even if they decreased the price by 65%.

What's especially galling is that both these companies benefit tremendously from public investment (bedaquiline research was funded primarily by the public), and so we end up paying for it twice--once to develop it, and once to have it available to the sick.

This is infuriating, and it is resulting in the real impoverishment and death of so many people. How does it end? With better governance and regulation. In this respect, India can be a model for us--their courts have done a much better job than U.S. ones of determining what really deserves to be patented and for how long. I'm hopeful that we can learn from the, but disgusted by this ongoing horror.

[the-meme-monarch]

what if there were little guys. what if they were flowers but also vaguely animal shaped. what if they were like the smurfs or perhaps fraggles

edit: hey i drew more of them :]

[bat-kidsarebi-kids]

I love you transfems I love you tall transfems I love you short transfems I love you fat transfems I love you thin transfems I love you hairy transfems I love you transfems who shave I love you butch transfems I love you femme transfems I love you it/its transfems I love you transfems who don’t use she/her I love you transfems who exclusively use she/her I love you transfems who pass I love you transfems who don’t pass I love you transfems who don’t want to pass I love you transfems who are on HRT I love you transfems who aren’t on HRT I love you transfems who don’t want to transition I love you transfems who are still closeted I love you if you have a penis I love you if you have a vagina i love you if you are intersex you are not a sex object you do not exist for other people to use you up you are worthy of love regardless of your relationship to sex & you deserve to be backed by your community 100% of the time. transfems you are always safe on my blogs. i see you transfems I love you transfems you are more than enough exactly as you are transfems

[themousefromfantasyland]

Hot take: The talking Animals in Wicked are a better metaphor for marginalized communities than the Mutants in X-Men.

Yeah, I know that in the Marvel Universe most of the Mutants aren't as powerful as the X-Men, but they keep adding so many Mutants with god-like powers that it's hard to believe this community can be realistically oppressed by everyday humans.

To be fair, this is true to all other productions that try to use super or magic powers as a metaphor for being in a oppressed community.

Remember those films that put the obviously attractive actors in plain or just ugly clothing to say that these characters are plain?

The super powers as a metaphor for marginalization is this but with a whole group or race.

But the Animals in Wicked are different.

They are not powerful, they are not special, they are not glamorous. They are not the dreamy characters that the audience wants to project themselves into.

Being an animal doesn't give you good looks or superhuman abilities. Being an animal doesn't make your life easy, especially when you live in a society dominated by humans.

First, they don't look human at all, which turns easier to demonize and scapegoat them. They are almost a too easy target for humiliation and ostracism.

And second, the fact that most of them lack hands with opposable thumbs, means that the whole infrastructure of Oz has to be adapted in order for them to live in society. This puts them into a disabled category, and we all know how cold and even downright malicious a society can act towards anyone with a disability.

Also, I love how Wicked: Part I casts the humans.

There are POC EVERYWHERE, and this serves this message about prejudice and systematic oppression in several ways.

Not only this avoids typecasting POC as the perfect victims to appease white guilt, it shows that nobody is immune to propaganda.

It shows that ANYONE can be perpetrator of systemic violence. No one is immune to be part of oppressed or to be part of the oppression of others.

@ariel-seagull-wings @the-blue-fairie @princesssarisa

[x-enocyon]

I would urge everyone to take a break from major social media coverage of the election every so often. You owe it to yourself not to doom spiral. Yes, it is bad. But it’s not over for us. Queer people have always endured and we will continue to do so. You still have communities that love you and want you here. Check in with the people who support you in your life, rest, do what makes you happy. It sounds corny, but this isn’t an expression of “just pretend it’s not happening!” I think it’s important not to let them completely demoralize you. You are still wanted here.

[xmimikyuusx]

The conversation of whether a trans man has male privilege should not be apart of the conversation of our oppression as much as it should not be when talking about if a trans woman experiences male privilege. If you bring it up like it's some important "well, if you experience male privilege you're evil/not oppressed so you dont matter" you need to put down the radfem juice pretty please

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

A must read that includes the percentages of how each demographic voted. An alarming number of marginalized people defected to Trump.

[transmaverique]

amab and afab, if they were used as shorthand for the actual full phrases that they signify, with emphasis on the "assigned" part, and an understanding that they are enforcements of normative (ie, dyadic and cisgender and binary) sex, would be like. really useful. but people took the terms and started using them as shorthand FOR normative sex instead of the ENFORCEMENT OF normative sex. so when other trans people (almost always dyadic trans people) ask for your agab they are almost always asking for your Original Genital Situation. your starting point, so to say. and the reason FOR asking is also almost always bc they are trying to also enforce a certain kind of normativity within queer spaces (which is stupid bc being queer is inherently non-normative but here we are). like, you cant be a lesbian if you're ftm, bc you ARE m, so if you ARE a lesbian, then that means you're lying about some aspect of your identity. does that make sense?

it is always always always incredibly.... i do not trust dyadic trans people that use cagab terms, even moreso than i do not trust dyadic trans people that just use agab terms. agab is also coopted intersex language, but the "coercive" part of cagab SPECIFICALLY refers to medical "intervention" of intersex characteristics, such as "corrective" surgeries and hrt. i am deeply fucking suspicious of any dyadic trans person that uses those terms exactly the same as described above, even moreso if they do so bc "all gender is coercive".

like. yeah. that's true. but you use these terms to erase and overtake intersex discussions on the medical abuse of intersex infants. and i cant help but wonder why you would feel the need to do that.