Ramblings of a Tea-drinking Loon

Random thoughts, questions and bizarre/humorous (at least to me) things found. Why are you here?

[cosmicanger]

Trans people: Hey please don’t buy this game.

Cis people: What if I bought it, but also donated some money to charity?

Trans people: No thanks. Please just don’t buy it.

Cis people:

“More and more I’m starting realize that many people see “charity” as a store where you buy goodwill from strangers. Like “being a good person” is something you can purchase with money”

[daughter-of-sapph0]

reinventing christianity

[ohnoitstbskyen]

Corrollary to this, please for the love of God, cis people with guilty consciences, do NOT message trans people to plead your case like you think they’re your fucking Trans Issue Indulgence Dispenser.

For that matter, stop fucking messaging ME about it. I’m a cis male gaming YouTuber, why in the flip-flop flying fricassee fuck do you think my approval fucking matters?

You’re not getting a seven hail Marys and a genuflection to absolve this. Sit with your actions and own them like an adult. You wanted your Treats™️ more than you wanted to make the universe’s easiest gesture if support for people being persecuted. You resented being asked to give up the slightest little thing for someone else.

[doberbutts]

“trans men don’t experience misogyny because they’re men thus cannot experience women’s oppression”

I hate to tell you this but even cis men experience misogyny if they step a toe over the line of what our incredibly sexist society sees as “proper” for a man. You really don’t think that a man with interests or expression the world sees as “female” aren’t treated with violence?

[katelyn-danger]

That’s not what misogyny means. Misogyny means systemic disenfranchisement based on your gender. What he’s experiencing is homophobia and/or transphobia. These all have elements of each other in them (as they all describe deviations from the norm of being a cishet white man) but they mean different things.

It’s not about individual people experiencing violence. It’s about how groups of people interact with systems. Men, even GNC and trans men are valued more than women because the systems we’ve designed benefit men more. Even they’re experiencing homophobic or transphobic harassment.

[bisexualboydyke]

I don’t know what kind of universe you live in, but you do realize that not every trans man is going to be clocked as a man in their day-to-day life and will still experience discrimination against them for being a woman even if they aren’t a woman right?

Like I’m sure the dudes who have flashed me their penis or called me a dyke, or threatened to rape me did not care that I identify as a man or use he him pronouns. Just like the people who would attack me for being brown probably wouldn’t try to figure out what flavor of brown I was before they killed me. 

I really need yall to realize that trans men do not exist only on the Internet with our identities and pronouns in out bios . We live every day lives and work every day jobs around every day people who are sometimes violent or misogynistic against us.  a lot of trans men will never have the luxury of not being seen as women. 

[katelyn-danger]

You seem to be using your personal experiences of transphobia to ignore the fact that these are academic terms used to describe real world phenomena. I’m sorry that all of those things happened to you, but you need to understand that when people treat you like a woman, or me like a man, what they’re doing is being transphobic.

You need to step back and look at this objectively, because describing all of the times you’ve been affected by transphobia, but remaining ignorant to the times you’ve been privileged as a man isn’t helping anyone, and a lot of times is used to attack trans women when we complain about transmisogyny. You’re literally trying to pull the “not all men” trope when we’re discussing a term that describes how systems of oppression interact with groups of people.

Bring me statistical evidence and I will consider your arguments. Anecdotal is insufficient.

[doberbutts]

It can’t be transphobic violence because I was not presenting as, clocked as, or pursing transition as a trans man at any of those points in time. I was identical to any other cis black girl (+/- intersex traits) at the time. These people were treating me like a black woman because that’s what they thought I was- or a Mexican woman in the case of the one customer. So it was misogynoir, not transphobia, not homophobia, that inspired their actions. They saw a black girl existing in a space they felt she shouldn’t, and punished her for it. It doesn’t matter that that black girl is actually a black trans man.

I don’t need statistics to prove whether it’s misogyny or not. The literal legal definition of hate crimes hinges not just on your actual identity but also on what you are perceived as.

It is the perpetrator’s bias, not your identity, that determines the “category” of the crime. You don’t have to believe me. This comes directly from the government of the USA, and from multiple other governments around the world.

It is not anti-Sikh bigotry that inspires the uptick of attacks during 9/11 when they are mistaken for Muslims. It’s Islamophobia. It doesn’t matter that they’re not Muslims. It matters that the bigots who attack them think they are.

Likewise it doesn’t matter that I’m not a woman. I lived and was attacked as one for two decades. YOU do not get to silence ME when I tell you these things have happened to me. YOU do not get to define MY experience to make it fit conveniently into your understanding. Like it or not, those who harmed me in these and other situations did it because they wanted to hurt a black girl existing somewhere they didn’t want to see her. My experiences match my sisters’, and they match black women’s all across the world. Of course I find solidarity with them. It’s all misogyny. It doesn’t magically stop being misogyny just because you don’t like admitting that sometimes men do actually experience what women do.

If people were to do it *now*, now that I am very blatantly transgender, now that I pass more often than I don’t, *now* it would be a mixture of transphobia and misogyny and homophobia. But back then? They weren’t attacking me because they didn’t like transgender people. They were attacking me because they didn’t like BLACK WOMEN.

[mariposakitten]

“It’s not misogyny, it’s transphobia!”

IT CAN BE BOTH

[ravingsockmonkey]

Academic pedantics about the word you use to describe the hate you’re getting sure is a damn thing I guess.

[erinlynnjeffreys]

“Trans men are valued more than cis women” is always such a hilarious take to me because, like, how? when? where? 

I’m a “non-passing-as-cis” trans man (i.e., perceived as a cis woman despite my best efforts otherwise) married to a “sometimes-passing-as-cis” trans man. And, yes, when he is perceived as a cis man then people in public often treat him better than they treat me. Just like those same people used to treat my previous cis man husband better than me. The pattern holds true: cis men (and people perceived as cis men) get better treatment than I do when we are out in public together. 

But when he is perceived as a trans man then I’m the one treated with respect, while he is treated like a child or a fool or mentally ill. I have seen doctors and nurses literally refuse to engage with him once they learned he is trans. Instead they immediately transfer their attention entirely to me and speak only to me during the entire course of his care. I have repeatedly been treated me like his caretaker, and he has been treated like an imbecilic child who not only cannot be trusted to make decisions about his own care but outright is not worth talking to about his condition. 

I cannot stress how unusual this is in my experience. Like, doctors who will talk to children with respect will turn around and ignore my adult trans husband rather than engage with A Trans. My own personal experiences are that when I was a 12 year old presumed-cis girl with a spinal deformity in the hospital I was shown more consideration and respect from the doctors than my adult trans husband. 

So. Sure, you can make the case that some trans men are accorded more respect than cis women when people think they’re cis men. But never, never have I seen my trans husband treated with more respect than I once the people in question know he is trans.

Note: There are, of course, people who treat us both with equal respect. Presumably because they’ve unpacked the toxic social shit we all grow up in and they strive to treat everyone with respect, cis or trans. But those people still don’t treat my trans husband with more respect than they do me, which is the point I’m arguing: that the idea that known-to-be-trans men are somehow regularly accorded more respect than cis women are. Never in my life have I observed this supposedly common phenomena. 

[disaster-vampire]

why exactly do we need to pull out statistics to tell you about our own experiences? how am i supposed to have statistics on this?

i’m nonbinary and have still experienced misogyny, transphobia, and homophobia, and i can tell you they present very differently.

an old man telling me my ass was too fat for me to ride a bike when i was 12 and i had no idea what the word trans even meant and was forced to present as a female was in no was transphobia or homophobia. it was plain misogyny.

schoolmates in high school yelling “lesbian” at me when they saw me walking somewhere minding my business? homophobia and misogyny.

that guy who looked at me like he was going to beat the shit out of me last year because i was binding and somewhat passed as a dude yet i was wearing a glasses chain and kept walking back and forth between the women’s and men’s section of the store? that was transphobia and homophobia.

there is a clear distinction, and while i may have been trans my whole life, i did not know i was for a big chunk of it and tried to be what i was “supposed” to. i tried very hard in fact, up until i couldn’t anymore. and now i get to have fantastic discussions on the internet such as whether or not i have male privilege (i don’t, because i am not male, and people don’t read me as male, and my documents do not say male) and whether or not i’m enforcing toxic masculinity when that is a word with a very specific meaning that is just thrown around as a buzzword at this point.

[his-shining-tears]

looks stupit I want ten

[tlitookilakin]

The best part of this is that the explanation is even sillier:

these aren’t even a “race” of khajit, they’re just regular khajit. Whether khajit end up like housecats or humans or a fucking lion is solely determined by what phase of the moons they’re born under.

[edgar-allan-possum]

So, you could be practically human, your sister could be a frickin smilodon, and your parents could just be housecats?

Wild

[lemonsharks]

Hands down the best worldbuilding ever made; all other worldbuilding is cancelled forever

This is the only thing we need

[lemonsharks]

Could you imagine telling your sister, who just wants you to open the tuna, neener neener neener who doesn’t have any thumbs?

Or “DAD. NEEDLE TOES, COME ON!”

You know this happens daily in so many Khajit households

[calder]

oh my god i thought theyd never show this in-game

[call-me-cee]

What does one even say to this

[vaporwavevocap]

“Pspspspspspsp” generally.

[mysharona1987]

[uncommon-etc]

As a Scottish person living in England I feel this on a personal level, when people say shit like “well it’s not the genuine asylum seekers I’m bothered by, it’s the people who just move here to get a better job and take advantage of our welfare system” and I’m like “Mate, I literally moved 500 miles south to a different country just to get a better job and better weather, if you’re going to hate on anyone for that hate on me.” 

Then they try to back-track and say things like “Well you already speak perfect English so it’s fine” and I’m like “My grandma didn’t speak very good English when my grandparents settled in the UK from Finland, what are you trying to say?” 

And they’re like “Well I’m sure you’re grandparents had useful jobs and weren’t just sponging off the system.” like… nah, my grandma mended clothes and my grandad sold garden sheds, they weren’t exactly brain surgeons 

“But they…” just admit it, it’s not white immigrants that bother you, I doubt Americans go on marches protesting the Canadian undergrad students who overstay their visas or all the germans and scandinavians who just rocked up in the Midwest one day and decided to call it their own.

This was how I finally started to understand white privilege. 

[crumplelush]

I remember reading about a white European of some flavour who had overstayed their visa and wanted to go home but couldn’t afford the plane ticket. They tried to turn themselves in to ICE to get deported, and were straight up told “we’re not looking for people like you”

[lizclimo]

[original-honeychiles]

This is the Target Dress Challenge - they fancied it up with a knife,gun and a cute bunny. I say they win

These are some other prime candidates

[thelifeandtimesofwhatthefuck]

Sometimes Twitter is good

[cipheramnesia]

I thought originally the customer was just offended someone sent them a cake celebrating the Philadelphia PD.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

I’m going to go ahead and point out the obvious, aka Megan Fox should be cast to play Morticia in the next Addams Family remake

[allaneddem]

Who is Megan Fox?

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

the woman who is legally allowed to murder Michael Bay and consume his corpse

[serenata-your-neighborhood-lefty]

[uncanny-tranny]

Some of y'all are truly uncritically transphobic toward trans men and it’s kinda disgusting.

I see y'all calling a trans guy’s chest “mutilated” or “gross” after his top surgery. I see y'all making fun of our voices, or the way we don’t (or can’t) pass, or calling our facial hair “neckbeards,” or making fun of our sexualities, or just because we’re existing as we naturally are.

Trust me when I say trans men see your infantilization of us and how you’ll treat us as broken women or how you’ll only recognize us but only when we’re able to be weaponized. Or how we’re erased from history and from narratives of trans liberation.

I see how our transness gets erased to call us gross for being men, or how our status as men is erased to call us confused, broken women.

Transphobia toward trans men hurts the entire community. An injustice for one of us is an injustice for us all.

Please reblog, but don’t belittle trans mens’ real experiences or our experiences with transphobia.

[thepersonalquotes]

[kendrene]

@anyilherron sent me this and I feel I should take it as a callout.

[prettyboyshyflizzy]

why do black people use you in the wrong context? such is "you ugly" instead of "you're ugly" I know u guys can differentiate, it's a nuisance

you a bitch

[rsbenedict-deactivated20181216]

It’s called copula deletion, or zero copula. Many languages and dialects, including Ancient Greek and Russian, delete the copula (the verb to be) when the context is obvious.

So an utterance like “you a bitch” in AAVE is not an example of a misused you, but an example of a sentence that deletes the copular verb (are), which is a perfectly valid thing to do in that dialect, just as deleting an /r/ after a vowel is a perfectly valid thing to do in an upper-class British dialect.

[pigeonstalking]

What’s more, it’s been shown that copula deletion occurs in AAVE exactly in those contexts where copula contraction occurs in so-called “Standard American English.” That is, the basic sentence “You are great” can become “You’re great” in SAE and “You great” in AAVE, but “I know who you are” cannot become “I know who you’re” in SAE, and according to reports, neither can you get “I know who you” in AAVE.

In other words, AAVE is a set of grammatical rules just as complex and systematic as SAE, and the widespread belief that it is not is nothing more than yet another manifestation of deeply internalized racism.

[kingkunta-md]

This is the most intellectual drag I’ve ever read.

[shitpostsampler]

Been a good while since I stitched my first shitpostsampler pattern. Here’s a dump: part 1

They’re also displayed on my instagram: sisestitch

Submitted by  siseja

[brawltogethernow]

“People are saying mask-wearing might become a seasonal practice” God I hope so I’m tired of getting breathed on every flu season and honestly they’re kind of fashionable.

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

As someone with immune system issues, this is the longest in my LIFE I’ve gone without getting sick. I would be so grateful if people keep wearing masks seasonally or at least when you have any symptoms that might conceivably be a transmissible illness. A mild one or two day cold for a healthy person can take me literally a month or more to recover from, so thanks for masking up and not spreading your germs!

[aridante]

“After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: if anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately. Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there. An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this. I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly. Shu dow-a, shu-biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, sho bit se-wee? The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—she stopped crying. She thought our flight had been canceled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late. Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him. We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother until we got on the plane and would ride next to her—Southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course, they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours. She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies. And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—non-alcoholic—and the two little girls from our flight, one African American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice and lemonade, and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere. And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped—has seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952), “Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal.”

[jaybear1701]

Since the very beginning of the show, Nicole has never liked being sidelined and kept in the dark while Wynonna and Waverly make unilateral decisions about what they think is best for their family, friends, and Purgatory.

Despite establishing that issue, the writers had Nicole contribute to a rift with Waverly in season 2 over a similar lack of communication problem. And then in 4x01, she punched and argued with Wynonna who, while well-intentioned, had sidelined Nicole again while Waverly and Doc got trapped in the Garden.

Against this backdrop, we have Nicole in the latest episode... sidelining Waverly and making a unilateral decision to kill herself to remove the Clanton curse. I just... :-/ :-/ :-/

Listen, Wayhaught intimacy and physical affection are great and all, but after four seasons of the same issue, I'd love to see some actual relationship growth if I'm to believe these two are anywhere near ready for marriage.

[griever0211]

I don't usually post original content but with everything going on in the world, and dealing with covidiots and racists, we've now got ableism mixed in. My fiancee and I live in Brighton, where the council is redefining disabled parking spaces with no consultation. Either the spaces have been removed completely, or moved so that actually trying to exit your vehicle is inherently dangerous. My fiancee is a wheelchair user and she had this to say:

"I'm pro green and for cycling but the Council seems to have embarked, with no consideration, on an utter disability ignoring rampage. Just seen that the bay outside Hove library has gone as well as seafront carnage! There's a whole blue badge activist Facebook group as the council is randomly covering and annihilating disabled parking spaces along the seafront and in town! No consultation no thought! It's scary for us wheelchair users! It was hard enough getting about as it is. There are now only 7 yes 7 dedicated blue badge spaces along the seafront and access to the only fully changing places (a fold down table for adults in nappies etc) on Madeira drive has been taken with the expectation that having bays way away from it is fine! The new handful of ones along the main seafront you are expected to cheerfully disembark on a wheelchair ramp into oncoming traffic and/or cyclists in some horrific ableist sandwich parody of access!"

It's absolutely ridiculous and depressing.