#if you live anywhere smaller probably don't say that online
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SEATT;E MENTION??
ah yes, the great city where I once very shyly asked Justin chapman and Adam Katz whether cabby and test tube were friends after iii, and Justin gave me a lovely answer about how they might still have some things to get over but they think they'd get to be close, and meanwhile Adam stared silently and intensely at me as if he was trying to telepathically tell me he knows what I am (smart girl object yuri enjoyer)
also it must be said. I am not kidding about the fact that the city was laid out by two people who did not consult each other. I don't have sources on this at present but I found out about it in my 7th grade history class and we all kinda went "ohhh that explains a lot"
#obligatory statement. I'm only comfortable mentioning that I'm from Seattle because it's a big city#if you live anywhere smaller probably don't say that online#like I'd never say where I live during the school year because that could potentially be easier to find#internet safety is important and all that jazz
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It’s been a while since you’ve talked about it, but I’m worried about visiting LA this year. I don’t live in a city that big, I can’t really investigate it online, and I have no idea where it’s safe to hotel there. Where do you (did you? You may have moved on?) feel safe in the city? Where would you recommend to people visiting to stay? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to! You’re just one of the very few people I know that has lived there. Thank you, regardless of your answer, you didn’t have to read this at all❤️
hi! answering publicly in case anyone has advice they want to add :)
i'm a little worried this might come off as dismissive, but honestly i just don't find cities to be that dangerous. i've lived in LA for almost eight years, lived in another city for 3 years before that, and have visited about a dozen major cities outside of america
homeless people, by and large, aren't going to bother you. if you have a couple bucks to spare, give it with a smile and look them in the eye, and move on, or if you have nothing it's fine to say that you just don't have cash. if there's an encampment, which happens all over the city and just not on skid row, then they're definitely not going to bother you because they don't want to cause trouble and get kicked out of where they've managed to find a consistent place to sleep
the truth is if you get assaulted, statistically it's going to be by someone you know rather than a rando on the street. if you do get assaulted in LA by a stranger, it is WAY more likely to by an out of work background actor named josh who picks up shifts at a tiki bar than a homeless person or gang member
that being said, i actually have no idea what neighborhoods are considered dangerous in LA these days? i guess the flip side of finding nowhere in LA particularly dangerous is that it's all dangerous, but really you're more likely to get taken out jaywalking in dtla than anything else
as for locations, it's important to remember: los angeles is huge
it's more like a bunch of small towns next to one another than one cohesive city. the town i grew up in is smaller than the neighborhood i currently live in. if you're visiting, i HIGHLY suggest you rent a car. the public transport in LA is shit
i've only been to east LA to visit friends and eats burgers. both were enjoyable, but you're relatively far from the coast. they also built a stadium in inglewood, which multiple friends have informed me has fucked up the housing in the area, but i don't know if that would make it better or worse to stay in
anywhere in the valley is going to be cheaper than the city proper. north hollywood and studio city are good for that. the garland in noho is really cute and right next to the highway. sherman oaks and van nuys are decent too and they're literally right next to each other. i personally think encino is one large strip mall and so is panorama city, but panorama city at least has the saving grace of good filipino food
if you get to northridge, you've gone too far north. malibu beaches are definitely worth a visit, but it's such an expensive area and so far from everything that i wouldn't stay there
hollywood proper, venice beach, and santa monica are probably the most quintessentially LA places, but I would only stay in santa monica out of them. not for safety reasons, but because the other two are filled with tourists. which, i know you'll technically be a tourist, but still
koreatown has great food, but terrible parking. it's also a cheapish place to stay. downtown LA is something I avoid because it just reminds me of the financial district of every city i've ever been to. the dtla library and the last bookstore are the only things worth going there for, personally, and it's also a very expensive place to stay.
little tokyo is very cute and manages to feel separate from city while being surrounded by it. i admittedly only go to chinatown for bakery runs, but it's all delicious and vey beautiful, especially if you've never been to a chinatown in a major city before
west hollywood is expensive, and i wouldn't stay there myself, but it has great brunch places and devastating parking rules. the most expensive parking ticked i ever got was in weho. burbank is the land of animation studios and also porto's. it's a really cute area. beverly hills exists and taking a walk on melrose is fun but i wouldn't linger. again, not safety, just terrible vibes.
i know this probably seems like a lot but i've actually only listed the more popular neighborhoods that i'm personally familiar with. los angeles is HUGE.
i hope this helps somewhat! and sorry to anyone who's neighborhood i've disparaged T_T
#asks#moirail-mate#please don't destroy me for my LA opinions#i'm sure someone out there loves encino#oh! okay i will say the only decent place to get a steak and cheese in LA is in encino#so it has that
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[ad_1] What's going on guys Thomas Garrett's here and in this video I'm gonna show you how to make money with Google Maps with this new secret method that's literally going to blow your mind and I might as well address the elephant in the room if you see my videos before you Know that this isn't my normal courting area and you probably can't tell from this view but this is a completely different room and this is not how it was supposed to look and if you want to like find out why I moved my room what's Going on you can go to the first link in the description join my facebook group and I just made a post about it there now if you haven't seen my videos before and you're like what is this guy talking about who is he my name is Thomas Garrett's welcome I make videos about How to make money online I would start your online business so if that's the kind of content you're interested in make sure to subscribe and hit the notification belt that way you get notified every time I come out with a new video and regardless of if you have Or have not seen my videos before feel free to leave a comment down below and let me know what you think about the new setup that you'll be seen for the next couple of weeks until mine's finished but now with that out the way if you're Excited to learn how to make money with Google Maps make sure to smash that like button and let's get into the video alright welcome to my computer so step one of this is obviously gonna be going into Google Maps right and we're gonna be looking for a very specific business That has something very specific missing from their website and that thing is going to allow us to make some money and you can truly type in any business from any city but I suggest starting with small local businesses in the service-based industry so that's things like electricians in Minneapolis now the Reason why I say that is because starting local these businesses are gonna have much more trust for someone who's local and living in their city than some random person on the internet not saying it doesn't work it does work anywhere but that's where I would start and the reason why we're using service Based industries is because these businesses the small businesses are gonna work the best like you don't want to go for like if you're doing plumbing you don't want to do roto-rooter right like I don't know if that's big in your state but it's a huge company so you Want to go for the like smaller businesses so I hope that makes sense and a ton of people commenting on the last video I did kind of like this and they're saying oh do you think this is gonna work with what's going on in the world and yeah it will Because these businesses need our help now more than ever and sure if you think after watching this whole video that it's not gonna work you could do this same strategy that I'm gonna show you for an e-commerce business so obviously it wouldn't make sense with Google Maps But you could use the strategy I teach you for any e-commerce business and there's tons of them online so just make sure you watch the entire video and you're gonna learn some insane stuff now after you've typed in your business you can either go over here and you can just Click around and find different businesses or you could go up here let me type it in again you can go up here and you can just click a business up here so let's just click this one and then what you're gonna do is you're gonna go to their website okay so you Can see if we go back to results you could just click website here or if you like clicking over here you would just go down and click their website now what we're looking for is we're looking to see if this business is running any ads for their company so how do we figure This out there's a few ways to do this and the first way I guess would be going to Facebook ad library and what you do on here is you type in their Facebook business page and then it will show if they're running in the ads and then you
Can also go to like these spy websites I don't know like spyfu I think is one and then like sim rush there's a couple different there's a couple different ones of these that but they cost like thirty forty fifty dollars a month and it just takes a little more work so the Most simple way to do this is just to go to Google in unique Google Chrome for this so you need Facebook pixel helper Chrome extension okay so you'll just type in Facebook pixel helper and download this it's completely free so definitely do that that's what I'm gonna Use now you can see I have it right here Facebook pixel helper in what the Facebook pixel does is it's just a little piece of code you put on your website and it will track visitors and you can't run Facebook ads without having a Facebook pixel so that's how You know if the company is actually running Facebook ads or not cuz if they don't have a Facebook pixel they're not running ads alright so if we go to my website right here and we refresh the page you can see there's numbers here now okay so this is a Facebook pixel Alright I have one on my website now if we go back to this website and refresh it you can see nothing shows up no pixels found on electrician - Minneapolis calm all right now this isn't a tutorial showing you step-by-step how to create Facebook ads but I will be showing you some secret Strategies and showing you how to get started with all of this but before doing any type of ads you need to actually get this business as a client so there's many ways to get in contact with them usually if you just go to the contact page you can fill out a form you Can email them you can call them and you could say something like hey I was just viewing your site and I realize you didn't have the Facebook pixel installed on your website and I actually specialized in running retargeting ads for companies just like yours and these retargeting ads not only cost Much less but they have much higher ROI than traditional ads now if you specifically don't know what retargeting ads are they're just ads that show to a specific audience so this could be an audience of people that visited the website in the past hundred eighty days Or they were on a certain page on the website in the past thirty days right it could even be a specific audience that viewed ninety percent of a video you posted on Facebook and it's super super powerful because you're showing these ads to people who already know about This business it's not like cold traffic who's never heard of this business before you know what I mean not to mention they're much easier to actually run them like for example I opened up this blog post right here this is a this is a spiral it excursion below if you Want to read the entire thing but these are statistics worth thinking about so 25 percent of online viewers enjoy seeing retargeting ads website visitors who are retargeted are more likely to convert by forty three percent three out of five online viewers notice and consider ads showing products they viewed from another page the Click-through rate of a retargeted ad is ten times higher than the CTR of a typical display ad 91% of marketers who have used retargeting ads have found it to perform the same as or better than search email or other display ads compared to other placement strategies retargeting generates the highest lift In business name searches by one thousand forty six percent thirty percent of consumers have a positive or very positive reaction to retargeted ads while only eleven percent feel negatively about them alright so you get the idea right I'll put that in the description if you want to check Doubt but that's just proof that what I'm saying it's actually legit retargeting ads are fire all right so now after you message them or whatever and they respond and maybe they're asking about cost you could charge them maybe a hundred to three hundred a month maybe just one to two hundred just for Doing retargeting cuz
it's much more simple and you're not having to like do like interest targeting on Facebook so it's much more simple if you were doing all types of ads and that's what they wanted you could charge much more maybe three hundred to a thousand some marketing agencies charge thousands of Dollars to run people's ads and if you're brand new and you're just learning you could do something like a test run you could tell them look you don't even have to pay me upfront you just pay for the ads and if you appreciate or if you approve of the Results then we can talk right and that's very powerful and of course you could always outsource this stuff on Fiverr calm or upwork.com but I always suggest just starting out and doing it yourself once you know what you're doing then maybe outsource it but doing is the best teacher and actually Knowing what you're talking about when speaking to these businesses you're gonna get much more sales because you know what you're talking about if they ask questions you know what I mean so it's just much better that way plus running ads is like one of the highest income skills out there so it's Definitely a good skill to learn and to have in your arsenal now once you actually get the business as a client or before you could actually set this up you want to go to face book business manager it's business da facebook.com/ and then this is how you can actually Access their ad so you would go right here and you would go to business settings right here and then you would go to partners all right so you can see right here partner to share assets with give them permission to work on your asset so they can help manage pages or Ads and then you could request assets from and then you could add a new partner and request asset to work on their behalf so that's what you would do you would just add their email and then they could approve you to actually run their ads for them okay so this is Business manager you could type that into Google or you just go to business that facebook.com now and you know how he's talking about Facebook pixel if we go right here and we go to events manager these are my pixels so you can see it shows you things that Page view view content leads an issue a checkout purchase so it's just it's data right they can see when someone enters their email when someone fills out a checkout page when they purchase something and this is how you can really just provide so much value to these businesses that don't even have this They don't even know about it right so I'll show you a quick little tip how to actually do it but this isn't what this video is about but we'll just hit add new data source Facebook pixel and then you would name it whatever and then you just hit continue and then you Would hit manually install pixel code to website you would copy this and then literally in WordPress they have some themes have this built in if not you just download a plug-in and you put it into the head of your blog right so this is just the Facebook pixel code right Here that's all I did is I pasted it in there and then there's some other things you can do which facebook walks you through it all so don't worry about it but it's super super simple and every builder is a little different but like things like clickfunnels it's super Super simple to actually install the pixel I have a video about it actually but you probably won't be using clickfunnels with these businesses but if you have any questions about this stuff please leave a comment below I'm happy to help now so you know how I was Showing you right here how it tracked stuff this is how we can make like retargeting ads for example initiate checkout let's say on an e-commerce website someone just wanted to buy a watch and they're checking out but then they get distracted and they start scrolling Facebook that you could be Running an ad for that business have anyone who initiates checkout will get shown this ad right when they you know in
a chez checkout and don't purchase right so what you could say is hey we just saw you we you were checking out on our website but you must have got Distracted so we saved your cart for you and that's the first thing they see when they start scrolling Facebook they're so likely to buy it's absolutely insane so you can probably see the power there right and that's truly just like one of the many many examples of how powerful Retargeting can be but like I said this isn't about creating an ad but I do want to show you like kind of how it looks so you can have like a visual of it so you do it the right way if you're learning from someone but I Just hit create add and then right here what you want to do is you want to go to traffic and then we'll name it we'll just name it test retarget and then hit continue now right inside of the ad we can actually hit create new and then We'll do custom audience so it's super cool that you can do it from inside the ad and this is what I was talking about you can do things like a video so you can do things like people who viewed 90 percent of that video or the most typical retargeting is just website and Then what you can do is you can retarget all website visitors in the past hundred eighty days right so now every time someone visits your website they're gonna see an ad of you telling them about why they should go back to the your website right so there's many ways You can do it you could do people who visited a specific page you could do people who initiate checkout and then you can exclude people who purchased right so now what you're gonna do and of course up here you want to do all they meet the criteria of all so they Initiate a check out but they didn't purchase okay so now you're retargeting the people who specifically initiate a checkout alright so basically the most simple one you would probably just do all website visitors keep it simple do you like the past 30 days and you've made the audience test free target Create audience now it will take ill say go take a few minutes for them to like populate it but you're pretty much done with that now this is test retarget you want to keep it all broad it depending on what the business is you could change it to worldwide but typically it'll Probably be in the united states if you're using the specific strategy if you're doing this for an e-commerce business then worldwide might be what you want to do you could do automatic placements but i would typically just do the facebook feed but it's up to you do whatever you want typically the feeds Are gonna be the best Instagram and Facebook but typically just Facebook and then you want to make sure that you change the budget cuz a lot of the time these companies aren't getting a ton of traffic so like literally two dollars a day can be perfectly fine like legit It's pretty insane and then after you hit continue this is where you actually make the ad I'm not gonna walk you through this but this is what you need to do it's very very simple and make sure when you're doing a retargeting ad you don't do any interest targeting that's like Typically how you would make Facebook ads but you don't want any interest just the custom audience okay and again if you have any questions feel free to comment down below I'm happy to help both that being said thank you so much for watching I really appreciate it and If you enjoyed this video make sure to smash the like button but remember to subscribe and hit that notification bell if you have not done so already and if you want to join my facebook group that's the first link in the description I'd love to have you over there with me As well and lastly if you want to get access to the program that I'm personally using and it made me 5,000 dollars last month you'll see something in the description it will say program that makes me thousand-dollar commissions so click the link below that to get instant access and learn Step-by-step how to start
your own online business and make money online thank you so much for watching and until next time [ad_2] #Google #Maps #Money #SECRET #METHOD For More Interesting Article Visit : https://mycyberbase.com/
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anyway since i don't like to complain without giving actionable advice, here's are some other places i get books from that aren't so greedy about taking every last cent they can squeeze out of me!!!
(and these places may not be so accessible if you're outside of the united states, i'm sorry, i only know how to buy books in the country i live in; idk what to tell ya. hope someone else can help you if these sites don't work for you)
Thriftbooks. Thriftbooks is like the mama of discount book e-retailers and even if you don't use them, you've probably heard of them. I don't know how much the people reading this post buy secondhand books, online or not, but if I had to guess, the most loyal B&N customers are probably people who are not so experienced in secondhand book-shopping, because I know for myself once I was old enough to buy secondhand books online, I never turned back. And you only have to spend $15 for free standard shipping in the US, as opposed to 40 dollars for that same perk on B&N as a non-member. There's also an automatic rewards program that every so often you earn points to get a free book of value between 5 and 7 dollars; the value depends on what level of rewards you "earn" by being a frequent customer. They never take money from you to GIVE you these customer benefits. They incentivize frequent spending, but they don't take from you anything you won't willingly give them. Also, new books are almost always marked down from the B&N price too.
Better World Books. It's basically the same deal as Thriftbooks, rewards program and everything, but they also donate a book for every book sold and use their profits to raise money for literacy. I've also noticed that not-infrequently they sell the same secondhand books as Thriftbooks for a little less. Oh and it's also just $15 for free shipping from them, too.
AbeBooks. There's no standard get-this-much-money-for-free-shipping; it's essentially just an accumulation of independent booksellers. You can search for essentially anything on there and find it. It's a lot like eBay in that way. Because there are so many people selling on there, the prices for books that are directly comparable (same edition, same condition, etc) are pretty reasonable and competitive. I don't use this one as much as Thriftbooks but I can say from experience that if there's something I'm not finding anywhere else, I check AbeBooks. I've never not been able to find something on there. Sellers are located in more than 50 countries so shipping prices vary a lot; I believe they're automatically generated in most cases. Plus it's just a good way to support smaller businesses.
Oh, and this one might not seem like a big deal but eBay!!!! EBAY!!!!! There's always somebody trying to empty out some dead person's library on eBay!!! You can get some shocking deals on stuff that some person doesn't know how to get rid of, because no one seems to want this rare book nobody's ever heard of but you. BUT IF YOU'RE THE ONE LOOKING FOR THAT RARE BOOK!!! OH YES!!!! Oh and speaking of, THRIFTBOOKS AND BETTER WORLD BOOKS BOTH HAVE EBAY STORES OPEN AS WELL AND THEY HAVE AUTOMATIC FREE SHIPPING ON EVERYTHING!!! But naturally that doesn't go towards a rewards program on an account on their website if you don't make one. You decide what that's worth to you.
barnes and noble has been raising the prices of everything and further pushing for their premium membership option (which they raised the price of by 60 percent this year!) and then when they have big sales events, they're less than what they used to be.
last year at this time you could get one of their leather-bound book annex tomes for $12.50 (without a member discount) because of the 50 percent off all hardcover sales. but they raised the price of those tomes from 25 bucks to 30, and they decreased the sale from 50 percent off all hardcovers to 1/3rd off. so that same book that was $12.50 at last year's end-of-year sale is now 20 bucks. and that's supposed to be savings enough to induce me to walk into one of their stores this week?
i'm sorry but b&n has just gotten so greedy, even though their business has only been doing better and better in previous years. they do not have to be raising prices like they have been, and they can damn well afford to have the same savings events they used to. if you went to one of those hardcover sales a year or two ago, even if you lived in a less populated area like i do, you had never seen a b&n so busy in your life. things were flying off the shelves. they WERE making bank.
and as a company they've only been growing and growing (as much as the publishing industry has been, in recent years). but there are so many other ways to buy books. CHEAPER ways to buy books. MORE SUSTAINABLE ways to buy books. and since books and booksellers are doing really well right now, i don't see why barnes and noble is getting so greedy when they don't have to be. i dont like new shiny books that much. people buy books for the content, ultimately. sometimes we as consumers might make the choice that a new shiny book is worth paying a bit more for, but not that much. barnes and noble has just been demanding more and more of their customers' money for less and less benefit.
#cont#feel free to add more guys if you have some#also blah blah support your local library and support local small businesses selling books near you#as someone whose local library is quite underfunded though and whose local used bookstore is owned by a racist conspiracy theorist#these resources are everything to me#someone could probably say something about bookshop dot org but ive had trouble just using their interface before#and to my understanding it's all new books on there? not that thats a bad thing its just not what i normally buy#but those are all independent bookstores too#oh and better world books is having a buy-three-get-20-percent-off sale for the next few days#and considering so many of their books are like 5 bucks. you do not have to spend a lot by 'buying three'#unlike you do at b&n. loooool#i didnt put that in the main text of this comment in case this post has legs. but betterworldbooks does stuff like that all the time
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"i don't think fracturing communities into ever-smaller microlabels, implying vastly different community needs, and enforcing rigid distinctions between them is really as helpful as you think it is."
I will have to disagree with you here. This is one of the main point exclusionists use and it doesn't sound right. You're not one of them I'm pretty sure, so it's probably a misunderstanding.
Microlabels are not "fracturing" communities. They're giving voice and space to people who don't feel like they fit in the mainstream. That's the whole reason why Queer as a community exists, why MOGAI is a thing, too (that's also the reason why "queer is a slur" is a thing, because it's too broad and fits too much individuality and self-expression, and "mogai is cringe" is a thing, because of its micro identities feel like a threat, it's too freaky and abnormal and not like the palatable LGBTs).
There's more to people than being Lesbian, Gay, Bi or Trans. Some people don't like being the + in the LGBT+ and they have all the right to come up with their own terms, words and labels, create their own spaces and have their own rigid definitions. LGBT people have rigid definitions too, that's why microlabels exist.
We can be strong as a community even if we have individual needs, and strengthening individuals so they can find what works better for them, strengthen communities. It can work from the top to bottom, of course, the community influencing individuals. And it can also work from the bottom to top, where individuals influence the community. One thing doesn't negate the other, or invalidate them. Trying to gatekeep or exclude people does it.
Ok, I wasn't gonna respond to this, but I guess that I'm going to, because I like to put way too much effort into things that I should really just let go.
To start, I don't understand what you mean by "exclusionist" here. Excluding...who, exactly? The exclusionary, gatekeeping people you are speaking of and throwing me in with (which, although you say i'm probably "not one of them", the rest of the ask certainly implicates me of being), what are they gatekeeping? It seems like you're saying they're keeping people who don't explicitly identify as one of the Big Four letters (L, G, B, or T) out of the queer community, which is. idk. a kinda wild claim? Who precisely is being pushed out of the community by me saying "hey it's kinda weird when some pan people claim that bi people don't like nb people"?
If you're talking about a group of gatekeepers who don't think, say, people who use MOGAI terms should be part of the same LGBT community, yeah, those people sure do sound shitty. Never met one literally anywhere but online though. I've been an out trans lesbian for 12 years, lived in Illinois, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Washington, and Colorado during that time, and have that entire time only really socialized in LGBT / queer or queer-adjacent spaces, and I can genuinely say I have *never* met a person who, if you said you identified as pan, would try to stop you from being in that space. Again, I'm sure those people do exist, and if you encountered them IRL, that fucking blows and you shouldn't have been treated that way, I'm sorry. But that's such a wildly specific and small group of people that you are placing a huge amount of importance and blame upon.
In a similar "let's please talk about the real world" sentiment, saying that MOGAI labels are rejected by people because they are seen as "too freaky and abnormal and not like the palatable LGBTs"...holy fucking shit. I cannot leave the house without being stared at, and that's actually just been getting *worse* as the conservative attacks on trans people (and especially trans women) ramp up. Like half of the states in the US are being inundated with laws attempting or succeeding at criminalizing aspects of trans-ness. The overturn of Roe recently just opened the door to the reinstatement of anti-sodomy laws in 20-fucking-22, and multiple elected officials have already said they would support or enforce such laws. The idea that a gay trans woman is more socially palatable than a demisexual person is like, completely untethered from reality, I apologize, there's no nicer way to say it.
People 100% do have the right to come up with their own terms! I have no problem at all with that, absolutely none. Having a word to describe yourself is good, and I support all of them having a home in the whatever-you-want-to-call-this community. The issue with micro-labelling in the way I am speaking of it is that it can cause people to fall so far down the rabbit hole of specificity that they become atomized instead of seeing themselves as part of a larger movement, a larger history. And, not to assume, but the way you are speaking of categories like LGBT as having "rigid definitions" completely backs up this claim, because that is wildly, wildly, *wildly* ahistorical. The incredibly rigid definitions you think they have are recent, and have coincided with an increased desire to make those identities marketable in terms of politics, culture, and consumption. They have been made rigid in order to enable them to be sold back to you.
"Lesbian means you are a woman who is only sexually and romantically attracted to other women" is an invention of the last 20 years, if that. For a long time it was a term to refer to any women who had any intimate relationship with other women, to any degree. it's why, if you listen to any older dykes, i've never seen them phased by ideas like "bi lesbians", "he/him lesbians", etc. etc., because the term was purposefully open-ended. It spoke of an axis of one's romantic or sexual life, but it didn't close it off. It was supposed to be a beginning, a breaking through of the walls of straight society, not a new set of walls.
And it was the same with the other terms as well, with gay just in the last 100 years meaning everything from crossdressers to only men who are penetrated to only men who romantically like other men to men who like both men and women to men who just like men and a million variations in between and beyond. Trans has mutated so many times because its definition is inherently contextually defined against the current mainstream treatment of gender in society, which is constantly and forever changing. The "T" today we say means transgender, and we say it means specifically anyone who identifies as a gender other than the gender they were assigned at birth. But what if we went back in time? What if we mean "transsexual", or "transvestite"? Do we mean pre-op, post-op, non-op, non-passing, passing, man, woman, other, some, all, none? What about drag kings and queens, what about effeminate gay men, what about butch dykes who go by Daddy? These definitions are not rigid. You've been tricked by their mainstreaming into thinking they are. You are being sold something, and you'd do well to stop buying it.
Ultimately, this is the criticism I started with. Rigid definitions and the creation of ever-more-individualized microlabels, yes, may help someone understand what they are feeling, when those words can be so hard to find. But it can also isolate them. Let us bring in the bi / pan distinction once more. What is gained by either bi or pan people from harsh lines, harsh distinctions, rigid definitions, separate spaces? Any differences they may or may not have, aren't all of their lives made richer by having other people in them? Not a single one of them has had the same experiences as the other, and the point is not to try and match one's exact neurological state in that moment as close as possible to someone else's. The point is to get support, to learn, to receive and give care. If we are talking about community, communities are for that support, are for care, are for helping and advocating with others, for group action. If we want to have an actual community and not just one that snipes at each other constantly, we should be creating a bigger tent, not a tent city defined by ever-ongoing mitotic individuation.
There's no way for me to say this nicely, so I apologize, but this ask reads really intensely like someone who is a.) very unfamiliar with queer history and the history of these labels (or the modern ways in which they are used), and b.) is Very Online. You seem like you mean well, and you do care about making sure everyone is heard, and that's exactly the right attitude. Use any label you want, use it however you want- if it works for you, then that is ultimately why it's there, and why it matters. But do not use those labels as ways to define yourself only in opposition against other labels you (hopefully) care about. Ultimately, if we want to bring it back to my original post that inspired any of this, the reason I really dislike when people say that pan is a more inclusive label (by which they mean it literally includes more people under its umbrella of attraction) than bi is that it gives one group an identity at the expense of the other. This is what I mean by fracturing communities, and this is the exact thing I dislike about so much online discourse about these terms and labels.
That said, if you just get offline and meet real communities of real people, none of this matters to people who aren't internet poisoned like you and i, so that's always a nice comfort.
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