#two spirit rights

[hunkygreenbean]

Sam Nordquist

say his name

EDIT: Hey y'all, I know we all grieve differently, and some of that is through humor/sarcasm. If you wanna be snarky and sarcastic, please use tone indicators in the comments. I've already had one blow-up with someone who meant for a comment to be sarcastic, and I don't want that to happen to another person.

EDIT 2: I'm turning off notes/comments for the forseeable future. Y'all mfs need to take a chill pill. I know we've been going through a lot as a community, but taking your grief out as lateral aggression is not productive, supportive, or kind. I've addressed The Commenter Who Shall Not Be Named multiple times. I've apologized to them, and I've repeatedly told people to stop harassing them as they meant it as sarcasm. I'm so fucking sick and tired of seeing this happening. This is a microcosm of what's constantly going on in both the online left and queer communities. In times where we should be standing in solidarity, we instead point fingers at our own, and its why we can never get shit done. If you're pissed off, make your own post. If you're pissed off at someone, go write it down in a journal. Direct your anger at Sam's killers, patriarchy, white supremacy, but not your own folks. Use that anger to push for change and reform. Do not drive wedges between yourself and other queer folks. We are the only ones who have our backs, please don't fuck that up.

EDIT 3: I just found out that turning off reblogs does not turn off the comment section. As such, I have turned reblogs on so that way this can be spread. Just for the love of god, be nice to each other.

[supernovasolace]

I'm not okay. Took a mental health day to do my part and make some art about it. No matter the opposition, we won't be erased. A world without trans people has never existed, and it never will! 🏳️‍⚧️

May this piece be a small light in the darkness for those in need of comfort and hope. Feel free to share/re-post elsewhere if this resonates with you. Just please make sure you include the alt text!

[crystalsandbubbletea]

Their name was Nex Benedict.

Nex Benedict, not whatever name the news keeps saying.

Nex used He/Him pronouns according to friends, not whatever the news keeps saying.

Nex was the victim of a hate crime. Nex's death was because of a hate crime. Nex's death was not an accident, it was a hate crime.

[spaceysoupy]

So apparently it’s that time of year again where I have to post about this.

On lesbianism, white queerness, and 2S identity

Text below readmore

I am a two-spirit. My identity is specific to my Tribe and Clan, and even more specific to my family. I am not a man, I am not a woman, and I am not nonbinary; I am not defined by what I am not.

I am a two-spirit and I am a lesbian. That's not debatable.

But I am not a non-man.

There's an idea of two-spirits that we are just the ethnic version of non-binary

We're not. The reason you're so comfortable calling us nonbinary is because your idea of queerness is centered around the binary&what you are not: you're not cishet, you're not the oppressor, etc

White queers like to speak about 2S identities constantly as if we are monolith. "It's just a gender" "it's not a gender"

"they're not trans" "they're not queer" "they don't belong here"

The community tries to decide for the individual and that's so weird to me.

So much of white queerness is inherently about exclusion.

You need strict labels to exclude the people you fear. You write your definitions around your fear of intruders and by consequence you exclude the people that need your support the most.

You need people to "prove" they are queer before you let them in. You're like a fortress and you let vulnerable people drown in the moat; ignoring that the real oppressors don't need to be a Trojan horse to do damage, ignoring they are actively burning down the castle.

It's very sad to me, because it's ultimately tearing the community apart even further.

I've never felt very welcome in white lesbian circles and they've never understood my experience of gender, but it's gotten worse in the past 5 or so years.

As TERFs start to revive gold star lesbianism and center hatred of men as their definition of lesbianism, you start to get these younger lesbians that don't know history that start to parrot the rhetoric. First it's "non-men loving non-men" then it's "you're too close to Man™"

For many two-spirit lesbians like myself, this is very concerning. White lesbians are historically not the ones targeted by radfems.

Now we've gotten to the point that there are people denying that lesbian is an spec (multispec) identity while including (white) nonbinary people

White nonbinary people (usually AFAB nonbinary people) are seen as woman lite and are welcome in white lesbian spaces while queer Indigenous people are considered dangerous because white lesbians can't understand their gender.

When did understanding become a requirement?

We're getting very dangerously close to "lesbianism is ONLY attraction to women" and very close to "lesbianism is only attraction to *a very specific type of (white) woman*" and I really need young white lesbians to read about political lesbianism so they can see this

I don't want to hear "not all lesbians" or "well then they aren't welcome" because every time this rhetoric goes unchallenged you are actively welcoming these people to continue it and make it more and more extreme. Yes, even the kind that seems to have nothing to do with racism

Almost all of your exclusionary rhetoric is based on the racist ideas of political lesbianism and I do not know why you all cannot see that they want to move goalposts. It wasn't just bi lesbians, it wasn't just he/him lesbians, it wasn't just nonbinary lesbians. It's a tactic.

It really feels like young lesbians are not only letting us go backwards, but encouraging it. And that's thanks in part to the historical racism of political lesbianism, but many of these people ARE old enough to think critically and talk to people who've been through this.

So far I've seen this in younger lesbian spaces; the ones with older generations (the ones that don't welcome TERFs) have been pretty welcoming even if not totally understanding, because they at least recognize that you don't need to understand someone's experience to validate it.

But I'm really concerned for the young Indigenous lesbians who don't feel comfortable around older people and are going to these younger lesbian spaces only to be indoctrinated with thinly veiled TERF rhetoric. It makes me very concerned for our spaces as well.

So I'll say again

I am not a non-man and I am not a non-woman. I'm not defined by what I am not. I do not ascribe to your binary-centric definitions of queerness. I experience queer attraction to women. I'm a lesbian. You do not get to use community to decide my individuality.

Thread by ~Alitsanosga

Pronouns: hi'a/vsgina/utseli/uwasa

[little-apricot-orchard]

okay ive been seeing this a lot and its been kind of getting on my nerves

nex benedict, pobrecite, was hatecrimed- murdered- because of a law that REQUIRED them to use the girls' bathroom.

but what is truly annoying me, is the usage of the word nonbinary. nex is choctaw and lived on a cherokee rez. nex was not nonbinary, they were two-spirit

keep speaking about them. dont let their name be forgotten. and dont let their culture be forgotten either.

inshallah, their sould will rest in peace. they deserve to be in peace.

[demaparbat-hp]

Almost

[duckiemimi]

i really enjoy the contrast between jjk and dandadan's approach to the question of what it means to be human, specifically in how cursed spirits/evil spirits are perceived by the protagonists. where jjk is more philosophical and within the context of the story's universe ("humans and their inherent humanity; a clash of ideologies"), dandadan feels like a real world answer to that—within the first seven animated episodes, we've been introduced to two "big bads," both of which have been given gut-wrenching backgrounds, painfully human in a way that sobers the audience stunned. (appreciatively, i say) it gets too fucking real.

but i like the contrast in delivery and impact. where jjk reads like an almost stoic outline to a loaded question, dandadan is the raw pumping heart that colors within. mapping veins, living blood. what does it mean to be human? spirit or not, at the end of the day, it's all just human business.

[tigerrsmn]

"Say their name!"

Call and response at the Twin Cities vigil for Nex Benedict, organized by Thomas Edison High Gender and Sexuality Alliance.

[It is important to say their name. What’s their name?

(Crowd) Nex Benedict!

Say their name.

(Crowd) Nex Benedict!

Say their name.

(Crowd) Nex Benedict!]

[hecateisalesbian]

I will not let anyone forget.

Also a flag I made during these times. 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈🇵🇸

[starry-bi-sky]

thinking about Dan in CFAU and just how different he needs to be (in my opinion) in order for Danny's whole thing to work. Canon Danny with Dan's influence, would never even consider thinking of killing anyone even after losing people close to him because he'd be scared of becoming like him. CFAU Danny however has been festering in this hurt and anger for years and wants the Joker dead and is plotting it. I don't think he'd do that with Dan's influence.

I explained how Rath came to be in this post here. Things happened in TUE as normal -- Danny's family dies, he lives with Vlad, Vlad rips out his ghost half. The difference here is that not only was Danny in a grieving state (something exclusive to banshees that the post goes into) but he also doesn't end up fusing with Vlad.

What happens instead is that Danny's ghost half, consumed already with grief and now enraged by being murdered and lied to by Vlad, destroys him completely and disappears into the ghost zone. He traps himself unintentionally in a negative feedback loop of grief, and as a human spirit banshee, cannot mentally handle the constant agony and sorrow he's experiencing. What happens is that he ends up driving himself insane with misery.

So the difference here, ultimately, between Dan and Rath, is that at the end of the day; Dan is fully aware of his actions. He knows what he's doing is wrong, and delights in it. He acknowledges his lack of humanity and feels no remorse in doing what he does.

Rath? He's... not. Not really. Dan is a hulking mass of muscle; tall, towering, terrifying. He loves what he does and does what he loves. Rath, however, appears as a scrawny young boy in raggedy clothes far too big for him, hunched in on himself while dirty, unkempt hair curtains his face and hides whatever he doesn't have ducked down in his curled-in form.

Rath is locked in a constant, unending state of sorrow and misery. He, for lack of better words, is unable to perceive the world around him properly and lashes out terribly and violently at anyone or anything that catches his attention. The only thing that he knows is that his family is gone, his other half is gone, that everyone he loves is gone, gone, gone.

He is a zombie apocalypse wrapped up in the form of a malnourished child, wandering the world in search of people who are not there, and becomes furious if you're not them. He is constantly crying, but he's been crying for so long that he's all but lost his voice. Meaning anyone trying to keep an ear out for him has to listen for soft, pained gasps and quiet whimpering, and wonder if the sound they're hearing are hurt survivors, or the very thing they're running from.

As a result, Rath's influence on Danny isn't that he's scared of doing something bad and becoming like him. He's scared of losing control of himself and dooming himself and others to eternal misery. As a result, he's adamant that things that he's done were not done out of pure emotion, but were active choices he made.

Up to and including killing the Joker. There's enough grief and rage behind his views on him that anyone could argue, especially knowing that Danny's a ghost, that he was not in the right mind when he did it. He was blinded by his emotions and was not in the right mental capacity, he had no control over himself. It'd work as a convincing argument.

If it weren't for Danny himself arguing against it. Killing the Joker was a choice he made, fully and willingly. It was autonomous, premeditated murder and he won't accept anything else -- it was not a fit of passion, it was not act of insanity, it was a decision. He won't accept it being anything else but revenge either, and if anyone tries to claim that it was a necessary evil he will yell at them. He didn't do this for the betterment of the public, that was just a fortunate side effect. He did it for himself and Jason. If you wanted it to be a necessary evil, then you should've killed him yourself. It was a selfish evil and he knows it.

In the end, Dan’s existence would prevent Joker’s death. Rath’s existence only solidifies it.

Rath's complete difference from Dan is one of my favorite parts about this au even if he never makes a direct appearance.

[kaidatheghostdragon]

Prompt: Bruce vs Vlad

(But not the Vlad as we know him)

You remember future Vlad from the bad timeline? The one that had his ghost half ripped out and spent a decade regretting all of his life choices?

Some way, somehow, that Vlad ends up in the present day. It could be physical time travel, in which there are now two vlads competing for the same identity, which has lots of room for shenanigans, or a mental time travel where present Vlad suddenly has ten years of alt-timeline memories dumped straight into his brain.

Whichever the case, from a public perspective, Vlad Masters seems to just pivot left one day and alter his goals and business methods. That man has a million and one regrets and spent a decade thinking about all of the ways he could have done things differently, and now he has the opportunity to fix it. Dealer's choice on the exact details of how he goes about it.

Enter Bruce, who has long suspected Vlad Masters of being a villain meta, but has never had the time to really investigate someone who has nothing to do with Gotham and has been clever enough to stay off of the Justice League's radar.

Now, Bruce is all about reforming villains, and if Vlad's seeming reformation is genuine, more power to him. But in Bruce's experience, big changes like that don't happen out of the blue. He needs to investigate to either discover what triggered Vlad's change in perspective or if Vlad is planning something bigger than anything he's ever gotten away with before.

[he-said-irene]

She’s basted!

[xxplastic-cubexx]

it doesnt need to be said but its genuinely so funny how at-the-hip charles and erik are in krakoa like they really had the green light- the OBLIGATION- to be as obnoxiously close to each other as possible and abused that right to the fullest extent

[genitalkenobi]

I made a giant queer necklace!!!!!

[slamrink]

Nothing to see here just steph stealing glances of klay like he’s afraid he’s going to get caught 😃😃 (via namxsj on twitter )

[demaparbat-hp]

Soundless (Uiscefhuaraithe) Chapter II: Until the Fever Broke.

Read here!

Once her heartbeat mimicked his, the Blue Spirit let her go. Her vision blurred and then he was kneeling next to her, one hand between her shoulder blades and the other facing her, palm up, before pointing to the river.

Now, you can go.

So she did.