#interesting history all in all

[bsaka7]

The false claims of men masquerading as women offered a distraction from the realities of the IOC's contemporary sex testing project. What the IOC and the IAAF largely failed to acknowledge was that, by instituting sex tests, they were constructing their own definitions of femaleness. The IOC and the IAAF revised their policies to lend the categories of "woman" and "man" an air of coherence. First, they relied on physical inspections of each athlete's outward body; then they shifted to chromosomes, which they claimed would be more precise and scientific; later, and continuing into the present, they tried defining sex based on testosterone. Even as these shifts were underway, it was clear to astute observers what the IOC was doing. Daniel F. Hanley, the top physician on the US Oolympic Committee, complained in 1967 that chromosome-based sex tests "will establish a new definition of femaleness." Even de Merode once admitted that "it was practically impossible, scientifically, to define the sex of an athlete." Yet the IOC had backed itself into a corner. By implementing sex tests, they were keeping alive the illusion that sports could be inherently segregated by sex, as they had been since the earliest days of the Olympics. Sex testing became part of the fiction tat "men's sports" and "women's sports" were logical concepts. Abolishing sex testing would mean acknowledging that people cannot be sorted inherently into male and female categories. And if human sex is not built on a binary, fans might start to ask: Why, then, should sports be?

Michael Waters, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), 279.

[tariah23]

White people are miserable, racist losers period. They’ve even been getting mad at Japanese people for correcting them about Yasuke as well.

[kenobihater]

after literal years i finally got around to downloading a pdf of the wipers times, an unsancitioned satitical british trench magazine circulated among the troops in france from 1916-1918 after the fortuitous discovery of a printing press. i have approximately five million other things i need to read so idk when i'll be able to devote much time to it, and i gotta pick up a proper copy bc it's missing at least salient no 4 vol 2. that said? i'm genuinely laughing at what i've skimmed so far

[paradox-n-bedrock]

me in big fandoms: oh cool, it's so active and there's so many people to vibe with, this is amaz-

*finds my niche angle that appeals to approximately six people*

me: okay, folks, it's you and me now

[contact-guy]

I'm reading a bunch of self-reported case studies of queer people in the 19th century (Psychopathia Sexualis by Krafft-Ebing, for those who are curious) and I REALLY love that the impulse to immediately share life stories when you meet another gay person is timeless and universal

[zebracakesarecopingmechanisms]

ok so we know about the need to infodump, but what about the opposite? The need to absorb more information about your special interest like a sponge, but you literally can’t find any new material because you’ve already consumed every fact about it

[worfsbarmitzvah]

there’s such an attitude among ex-christian atheists that religions just spring up out of the void with no cultural context behind them. like ive heard people say shit like “those (((zionists))) think they own a piece of land bc their book of fairy tales told them so!!!” and they refuse to understand that no, we don’t belong there because of the torah, it’s in the torah because we belong there. because we’re from there. the torah (from a reform perspective) was written by ancient jews in and about the land that they were actively living on at the time. the torah contains instructions for agriculture because the people who lived in the land needed a way to teach their children how to care for it. it contains laws of jurisprudence because those are pretty important to have when you’re trying to run a society. same for the parts that talk about city planning. it contains our national origin story for the same reason that american schools teach kids about the boston tea party. it’s an extremely complex and fascinating text that is the furthest thing from just a “book of fairy tales”

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Welcome to the Dungeons of Fear and Hunger.

[segernatural]

sure it was a perfect storm of a pressure cooker but i promise destiel was about destiel

[sciencewife]

Caroline, assistant to Cave Johnson, testifies at the Senate hearings on missing astronauts, 1968.

"You really think Caroline would do that? Just go to the senate and tell lies?" Are you kidding? She'll give her LIFE for Aperture.

[fiona-fififi]

Call me homophobic, but I don't actually think it's great representation to stick a complex, dynamic, newly-realized bisexual character permanently with a flat, boring, underdeveloped love interest just because that was the first guy who showed interest.

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

OP: Check out. The fully-sexual charged cinematic movement design.

Cnetizens: How did the director come up with the idea to have him kneel on a playing card, adding so much aesthetic energy, is that some kind of genius?

[hopelessfandomfreak]

the way agatha and rio smirk at each other before agatha shows the coven her scar, and the way agatha immediately says “no you don’t” when rio claims she has a scar…like of course they know exactly what each other’s bodies look like, and it’s equally soft and hot how obvious they make it

[dreamofbecoming]

listen i know we all love steve “completely ignorant of queer culture to the point that bisexuality is a surprise” harrington being roasted and educated in turns by robin and eddie, yadda yadda, good stuff. i read “they made a horror version of rocky?” in a fic recently and cackled. also a big fan of “he knew he was bi from the start and just never talked about it” as a trope, love it excellent well done

but what about steve who realizes after starcourt that the most important person in his life now has this thing that’s a major part of her life that he knows nothing about, and what if he fucks it up? what if he says something ignorant or rude by accident, and hurts her? what if he loses her because he didn’t know the right thing to say? what if he can’t keep her safe because he doesn’t know what to look out for? absolutely fucking not, this steve says

and listen she’d never say anything, because she can tell that he can tell how much she likes teasing him and teaching him things, so he plays dumb, and she thinks it’s very sweet. but she notices when the zines she keeps under her bed that she buys at that one secret bookshop in indy when she can sneak away on family trips start going missing, always one at a time, and replaced in a few days with another disappearing. and she finds the new ones he must have gone to buy the weekend she was at her aunt’s house hidden in the back of his closet when she goes to steal one of his sweaters. and she notices when he slips more of her queerer movie recommendations into his personal take home pile rather than the movie night stack when he thinks she’s not looking.

she doesn’t notice when he drives to indianapolis after she tries to explain to him why she can’t just ask out a cute girl, tries to impress on him the fear attached to every moment of attraction that he simply has never had to feel, but later she finds a crumpled receipt from a diner in one of his jacket pockets when she’s looking for his keys, and the address is across the street from the bar the gorgeous woman at the bookstore told her about, the one she memorized the address of but hasn’t worked up the guts to think about visiting, and she knows he must have gone looking for a place like that, must have been trying to understand, must have been scoping it out to make sure it was somewhere she could feel safe, after she told him she never had.

so when eddie nearly pops a blood vessel when they clock each other and she mentions that steve is the only person she’s ever come out to before, her hackles come up. because she gets it, she does, he’s only known king steve until recently, so it makes sense that he would be afraid, be concerned for her safety.

but steve is her person, and no one- no one- has ever made her feel as protected or as cared for as he does. no one has ever tried as hard to understand her, no one has ever put so much work into making her feel safe and seen and loved. and she thinks maybe even if no one else ever does, that’s ok. because she has steve, and more importantly steve has her, and that means no one gets to question his ally credentials in her presence without a dressing down to remember, no matter how well they mean or how recently they helped save the world.

(and maybe she’s not as surprised as she could be when he figures out bisexuality all on his own, because she’s been reading all the same pamphlets he has, after all. and she’s seen the way he looks at eddie, i mean come on. maybe no one else has noticed, but then, nobody knows steve harrington like she does.)

[prolibytherium]

Just in general I think trying to look to pre-late modern period history for validation of LGBT+ identities is an absolutely useless venture. Every single underlying human experience defined through the lens and framework of LGBT identity has always existed, but it's impossible to pin down Exactly who and what a figure might have been if they existed in this contemporary context and decided to self identify via these labels.

It's also a wildly reductive lens that flattens the complexity and variety of how sex and gender has been constructed across time in different cultures, how sexual norms have varied, etc. This is not a constructive approach to learn about history and you're never going to be able to fit historical figures neatly into little identity categories.