#this shit's so complicated due to my ethnicity and the social norms

[zevrans-remade]

💀

[skeleton-bat]

Than don’t bring them up next time how bout that? You were the one that brought them up in the first place. Intersex people don’t fit neatly into the male or female category because of the fact that they can have different gamates, chromosomes, and other sexual characteristics that don’t strictly fit into the male and female category that you people have so kindly set up.

That’s a great definition that you yourself personally use. God it’s amazing how wrong you are. Did you know words are made up as is language and so different sexualities can exist based off the small differences in said sexualities. Also did you know some people go by attraction to gender and not strictly sex and they are just as much of their sexuality as they say they are. Did you alsonknow that not everyone in earth uses our own socially made words because there are many many different countries and ethnicities that have recognized other genders beside man and women for literal centuries. Do I need to bring up two spirit? Or will you just take a big ol shit on other people with that too?

Being a target of oppression means that there are political implications because if there wasn’t political implications than we wouldn’t be oppressed for being ‘different’ than the societal norm/acceptable. I didn’t say it was just a political statement but it is also one as well because it goes against the societal norms that were set up.

Some lesbians are indifferent to it get over it. You do not speak for every and all lesbians. You are not the whole communities voice and that’s never going to change. You should really learn to stop pulling smoke out of your ass just because you can’t wrap your own little closed mind around the fact that some women who date other women are still lesbians.

We have one but that does not mean it is so clear cut. There are variations of everything due to genetics and evolution. There always has been and there always will be. Despite how much you want to believe in your own bigotry nature is far more complicated than just a clear crisp cut of two. Intersex people exist, and even if they are more like one or the other they still do not line up perfectly and 100 percent with what the definitions of male and female are. If you believe female is xx and male is xy than what about those that are xxy? What do you mean delevoplmint disorders? They arnt disorders butts for brains it’s who they are. Intersex is as fucking natural as being born male or female. Saying intersex is a disorder is like saying how being gay is a disorder because it’s ‘against biology’ as if it’s not some sorta societal crap made up to just try and oppress others. If one is naturally born gay it’s not a disorder just how if one is naturally born intersex it’s not a disorder. My god. Get off this post if you want to keep being a bigot

fuckin ironic. I’m not a terf they say as they continue to invalidate trans women 

[itsalasallianlifeforme]

You Know You Are a Retreat Facilitator When...

...A man uses your race to try and pick you up at a bar and you’re not angry at least not immediately. 

A few weeks back, after a long and frustrating day at work I joined my community members at a bar on the north side of Chicago for a couple of drinks. My co-worker and community member Emily and I needed a few alcoholic beverages to numb our brains and that numbness was something we were both very much looking forward to. But as always, work doesn’t end when you leave the office. Upon a arriving there, we met up with our community members and met some of their co-workers that we were unfamiliar with. 

Half way through our time there, I went up to the bar to get another drink and there was a man who was sitting down and enjoying his own (clearly he had had a few more than I had at the time) and invited me to sit down. He seemed to be there by himself and in need of company. So I decide to be nice and sit down while I wait for the bartender to make my drink.

After inviting me to sit with him, he started the conversation off with “Are you Hawaiian?” to which I replied,  “No, I am Korean but you’re not the first person to ask me that.”  I’ve had a random plumber who came to fix something in our home ask me that before he left. Where people get the idea that it is just okay to demand to know your ethnicity when it is different than theirs is a more complicated issue that grinds my gears but that’s a whole other topic for possibly another blog post. Anyway, the man then went on to drunkenly make comments about my eyes, and how mine were lower than his, but that was “just fine” and that he was certainly “not racist.”  Whether or not he actually believed that statement, is unknown to me. I have a gut feeling that I know the answer, but it’s not fair of me to make assumptions about him and his own understanding of his privilege(s) and how they play out in his life.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the comments, but he then asked me “Do you hate white people?” the question wasn’t something that I had expected to come out of his mouth. I don’t hide my facial expressions very well but I know I am decent at hiding displeasure from my face (to the untrained eye) when I am making an effort, and at that point I was actively trying to do so. Despite being surprised by such a random question, I found the reply, “No, I don’t. Why would you think that?” come out of my mouth. With yet another smile. By the way ladies, don’t ever feel like you owe men smiles, that feeling is a social norm that has been ingrained into our minds but it is by no means required. You don’t owe anyone shit. He was clearly too inebriated to answer me thoroughly, but he then went on to trying to inform me that white people hate Trump too. I knew that, and recognized that it was probably another attempt at alleviating the guilt his man most likely felt due to his privilege as a white person but I decided that wasn’t something to tackle or bring up at the moment either. Nor was it fair to outwardly make that assumption. It’s not that these issues aren’t important to talk about, but it was clear he had drunk too much for that conversation to get anywhere. As a person of color, or minority of sorts I’m sure others have moments of understanding of interpersonal interactions with the effects of oppression, but let it all just sink to the back of your head to add to your collections of I-weep-for-the-sake-of-humanity moments. Spoiler alert, those moments fucking suck and they happen far more often than those who may not usually experience them (in that context) think. 

Ordinarily, before I started working as a social justice retreat facilitator I would have been immediately ticked off by the comments he made about my eyes. Yes, I know my eyes are more almond shaped. They’re my fuckin’ eyes. I see them every day, I apply to make up to them and that took me way longer to learn how to do due to their shape. I don’t need you to point out the difference between you and myself. But in this moment I found myself intrigued as to why he thought that this would be a good conversation topic. Usually I would have defaulted to my naturally sassy inclinations and pointed out that this was not a way to open up a conversation. But I wasn’t angry, I was surprised that my first instinct was to figure out why he thought what he thought, and why he chose to ask me these things...especially since I was a stranger. I had met quite a few people like him in high school and other adults bodies at the center that I work at. I had met handfuls of mainly white people who had come from privileged backgrounds and who may or may not have been curious to know about social justice issues and the lives of people they wouldn’t ordinarily come into contact with. I’d developed that art of keeping a straight face when someone says something problematic and do my best not to get angry, and instead ask them why they thought what they thought; in order to herd them onto the path of recognizing their own biases and assumptions about people and communities who were different than them. But what was this one’s angle?

Was it that he was curious and was just awful at conveying that?

Was it that he was terrible at picking up women, and this was the route of conversation he chose to pursue? 

Was it that he was feeling guilty about his white privilege and needed to confront his own biases and this was the platform to try to attempt that?

Who the hell knows. I didn’t, and still don’t. 

I sat there, unsure of what to do or say. I could have tried to help him break all of that down, it’s literally part of what I do for my service. He picked a good person to do this with, but he was clearly too drunk to really do what needed to be done to get anywhere. My friend, was standing next to me, speaking his room mate and I decided to use him as a scapegoat and politely told the guy that I had to go and keep an eye on my friend. The man looked dejectedly at me, and my friend (who is a male) and looked dead at me and said, “You know he is a homosexual right?” and then followed up that assumption with, “But by all means, go and have sex with him.” 

At this point, my retreat facilitator hat came off and I slipped into anger. I looked between my friend and this man, and told him outright, “What gives you the right to make that assumption about someone you’ve never met before, you don’t know him. And so what if he fuckin’ was?” Adding insult to injury, I made my departure from the bar and informed him that there was a reason that he was sitting at a bar alone, and my friend was here with 10 other co-workers and friends who were enjoying his company. I had been patient up until that point but at that moment my bucket of patience had run out. 

I believe that when someone is drunk, you see the parts of them that are suppressed by  logic and self control. I think that I saw a glimpse of this man in it’s unfiltered form and I was slightly sad that I couldn’t dig deeper on this interaction with him so that way this wouldn’t happen to another person he interacted with again. Perhaps that is someone else’s mission when he isn’t too drunk to have that conversation with him, I hope he gets to that moment where he can have a coherent conversation about it and better understand some of what he was saying. 

You know you are a social justice retreat facilitator when your goal is to help someone process/understand problematic things, not snap. To stand on your justice foot, and get to the root causes- not quick corrections for quick fixes.