Hmmm…

he/him trans guy artist nerd broconut 42, old in internet years

[cannabiscomrade]

So Arizona launched an “education hotline” that allows “concerned parents” to report “””critical race theory””” and other things like ~gender identity~ being taught in the classroom

It would be a shame if the number and email were spread to bad actors looking to prank call the AZ Department of Education

602-771-3500 or empower @ azed .gov 🤡

Horne said two staff members are sorting through the calls, and two investigators are working on credible leads.

[yeah-yeah-beebiss-1]

and for the love of god, don’t just spam it with memes or le funny shrek jokes or whatever, they’ll just hang up

make plausible-sounding reports for things that don’t actually exist, so that they actually have to waste time/resources investigating false leads - the goal is to waste time they would otherwise be using to do their jobs, not to get tumblr clout for being an epic troll

[neko-setsuka]

So apparently the internet article said the superintendent wouldn't be deterred by the prank calls because they would 'taper off eventually'. It'd be a real shame if this post stayed in circulation via queues so they get a consistent list of prank calls to filter through. 😇

[kineticpenguin]

Job Listings Abound, but Many Are Fake

In an uncertain economy, companies post ads for jobs that they might not really be trying to fill.

Hiring managers acknowledge as much. In a survey of more than 1,000 hiring managers last summer, 27% reported having job postings up for more than four months. Among those who said they advertised job postings that they weren’t actively trying to fill, close to half said they kept the ads up to give the impression the company was growing, according to Clarify Capital, a small-business-loan provider behind the study. One-third of the managers who said they advertised jobs they weren’t trying to fill said they kept the listings up to placate overworked employees.

You've probably been in the position of sending out your resume far and wide, filling out zillions of applications, and going weeks or even months before even getting an answer. Well, turns out a lot of it's because they're not actually hiring anyone. It's not just you.

[leporidaerus]

Via @suomasaminuorat

In 2023, two elections will be held in Finland. The Finnish Parliamentary elections, as well as the elections for the Saami parliament in Finland. One of these elections will be free. The other will not.

The Saami parliament is the autonomous representative body for the indigenous Saami people. Its functions and purpose along with its elections are determined by the Saami Parliament Act.

For a decade, the Saami have been working to revise the Saami Parliament Act, which directly violates our rights to self-representation and self-determination.

We do not get a say in how our elections are held and who gets to vote in them. The state of Finland denies us the right to develop our own democracy on our own terms.

Thanks to the Finnish chokehold on our elections, the Saami have seen a rise in anti-indigenous sentiments and anti-Saami policies, with non-Saami candidates running in our elections with a clear intention to destabilize and delegitimize our parliament.

In February of 2023, in spite of the recommendations of the UN Human Rights Committee, the Finnish parliament decided not to revise the Saami Parliament Act.The Saami in Finland will now be forced to endure elections that are out of our own grasp. We risk losing our own parliament.

By wilfully attempting to influence an autonomous indigenous parliament, Finland is actively violating our human rights.

We’ve tried everything. Please help us.

[titkoks]

[theriu]

YOU SURE ARE KILLING THAT SNAKE RODNEY, GOOD JOB

[sonicsuns]

What the heck kind of bird is that?? (Also I hate that I had to stop for a second to ponder if the whole thing might be an AI fake somehow. The future is gonna be weird, man.)

[anaxaver]

Its a secretary bird! they are super rad and do look like some kind of dinosaur or elaborate puppet creation.

[electronicgallery]

Museum Asks People To Recreate Paintings At Home, Gets 30 New Impressive Photos

It appears that boredom lies behind the most creative ideas. That's why quarantine has produced some of the most entertaining activities. One of them is the Getty Museum challenge, that so many of you have already seen in our previous article here.

[delphinidin4]

Narcissus taking a selfie is the ACTUAL best.

[simplyclockwork]

These are REALLY cool

[notallfay]

These are art in themselves, in a some of them point out what lockdown was like for us, they’re expressed themselves in a really cool way. But I think these are going to be talked about in the future.

[delightfulzombe]

Danai Gurira as Richard 111 in Shakespeare in the park in New York

[bemusedlybespectacled]

do you pronounce the "t" in "soften" and "often"?

Yes, I pronounce the T like in "lift" ("soff-ten" and "off-ten")

No, I drop the T in those words ("soffen" and "offen")

I drop the T in one of them but not both ("soff-en/off-ten" or vice versa)

Something else (tell me in the replies)

Voting ended onMar 27, 2023

PLEASE reblog, I have heard it on a couple of podcasts now and I'm genuinely curious how common it is! Also, if you feel comfortable with it, let me know what your accent normally is (Midwestern, Southern, New Englander, New Yorker, Minnesotan, whatever).

[justrook]

I drop the T in both, my accent is whatever mild drawl is in rural Arizona.

[queerasfact]

Pride 2022 15/30: Harry Allen

Trans man Harry Allen was the subject of a sensationalist newspaper campaign chronicling his regular encounters with police in the early-20th-century Pacific Midwest. While the reporting generally misgenders Harry and it is clear that he was a target of ongoing police harassment, it’s through these newspapers that we learn most about him, include one memorable article in 1915 titled “Trousered Woman Bites Policeman”.

learn more with queer as fact: a queer history podcast

[images: black-and-white newspaper photograph of Harry Allen, wearing a hat, collared shirt, and tie; black-and-white photo of Harry, crouching down, in a suit a wide-brimmed hat]

[transmasculine-history]

Ben, 64, Northampton, MA, 2014

I identify as an FTM, non-hormone, non-op, transsexual heterosexual man. That’s the whole string of it. I was in the lesbian community when I was younger, but I never really fit. That was the 1970s and there really wasn’t the language then about transmen or FTMs or any of that. I didn’t have that accessible to me as an identity. I thought, “I’m the only one on the planet like me,” but then in 1985, Lou Sullivan sent his little booklet through the mail to the archives I was working on. It was “Information for the Female-to-male Crossdresser and Transsexual,” a little booklet that he self-published with a little handwritten note that said, “Maybe some people in your archive would want to read this.” Even though he didn’t know me, he didn’t know who he was sending this to, I read it. I read it and within two hours I called him and I said, “I gotta meet you, because now there’s two of us, you know, on the planet.” And I flew to San Francisco to meet him.

When I got there, I dressed up super masculine. I even wore temporary facial hair, because I wanted to demonstrate to him that I was a man. So, he opens the door and he is this little frail ninety-eight pound gay guy with a t-shirt on and I thought, “Well, he’s a man and he’s kinda like me, but he’s kinda not like me.” We ended up talking for five hours straight in his kitchen. In the middle of it, he told me he had to get up and take his AZT. I hadn’t known that he had HIV/AIDS, but I realized then that I was making the closest friend of my entire life, the most pivotal individual for me, and that I was losing him at the same time. We corresponded until he died and when he died, I started the East Coast FTM Group because I had nobody and he had asked me to head up his group in San Francisco, which I couldn’t do.

I always felt some resistance to the fact that I didn’t transition medically, but over time I started to find transsexuals who had not transitioned medically, or who had transitioned partially and then stopped, like my friend Leslie Feinberg. Eventually I found more people with the idea that, “I’m already me, I don’t need any medical intervention to become me.” It took a ten-year journey with a gender counselor to give myself permission around this, because it is not popular, even in our community.

I’ve done a lot of organizing, much of it pre-internet. I did it the way Lou did it at first, all by mail. I remember the first big conference I went to, a True Spirit Conference, and I think there were 300 guys, FTMs, from all over the country and Canada, and I remember thinking, “It’s starting. The movement for FTMs is really starting, big time.” Now I have a vision for making the Sexual Minorities Archives a national comprehensive LGBTQ educational resource center with a museum and an art gallery with many rooms to show the collections, to have a youth room, to have a meeting room, to have a community room, and to be the preeminent LGBTQ archive on the East Coast. That’s what I’m most looking forward to as I age and that’s what I want to accomplish before I die.

From: To Survive on This Shore

[godbirdart]

so my apartment building got a notice board to post fire alarm tests and maintenance announcements and such. the building is pretty well-maintained, so we rarely get notices. the board is big and grey and to think it would be empty like that 99% of the time was a bland boring sin i just couldn't bear, so i vandalized the corner of its empty canvas with a teeny tiny Guy

and within a few days, there was a sudden addition from my one of my neighbors along with a Bunch of thumbtacks. this was an unexpected, but welcome surprise!

well there was still so much space, i figured i'd add another crumb to the art hoard. i'd been playing genshin that day so i drew my favorite grandpa

and like clockwork, new art manifested!! this person is gonna grow to be a great artist i know it. the detail in those stones? hell yeah that's cool.

we're two weeks into it. more neighbors have joined in with their artwork. who knew there were so many artists in my building?? we're onto somethin great here i just know it.

[godbirdart]

update: ONE OF MY NEIGHBORS DREW VENTI TO GO WITH MY GENSHIN GRANDPA I'M —

WHO DID THIS

[godbirdart]

i am retaliating i NEED to know who did this

[godbirdart]

JOJO HAS ENTERED THE CHAT

[kekwcomics]

[rajamie]

[theforesteldritch]

More explicitly anti-intersex bills are coming in the US, this one from Kansas. A revised version of an anti-trans bathroom and sports bill has now decided that intersex people should be excluded from ‘female’ washrooms and should instead be classed as disabled people and should instead be forced to use facilities for disabled people. To be clear, disability is not a bad thing, I’m disabled, but that is a separate thing than being intersex. Most intersex variations aren’t inherently disabling, and trying to class our bodies as disabled is an attempt to try to segregate us from spaces both disabled and intersex people have every right to be in. This is not from genuine commitment to the rights of disabled people, this is them trying to use the laws surrounding disability as a tool to make it okay to exclude us from their bullshit, intersexist and transphobic ‘female only spaces’. Not to mention, if we’re being forced to use (often way to few) accessible spaces such as accessible bathrooms if we don’t need to this impacts the people who actually do.

To make things even more enraging, this is a literal comment a legislator made about people with Turners syndrome: “A person in that state, I don’t think, would want to undress in front of even fellow females”.

This comment makes it clear, I think, their goal. They don’t think that classing intersex people as disabled would help us. They see disabled and intersex bodies as something wrong, something to be hidden away from all the ‘normal’ people. They see our bodies as something shameful and something impossible to be happy in. They don’t see us or our bodies as worthy of existence in society.

Fuck that. Fuck them. I’m so so tired and furious.

[renthony]

Fucking hell, thanks for the info, OP. I wanted to read more, so I did some Googling--dropping links here in case anyone else wants to read them, too:

‘Caught in the crossfire:’ How anti-transgender legislation affects intersex Kansans (Kansas City Star) (March 9, 2023)

Kansas lawmakers classify people with sexual development differences as disabled in revised bill (Kansas Reflector) (March 17, 2023)

Veto of Kansas bill on trans athletes sets up override fight (ABC News) (March 17, 2023)

[aphony-cree]

According to one of the linked articles, this also bars people from women's shelters (including domestic violence shelters) unless they have a body that "developed to produce ova"

[justrook]

They are the fucking worst, I cannot understand how anyone would think this is something you should do to another human being. Hate them with my whole heart.

[uncle-fruity]

Taking T didn't ruin my singing voice, and frankly I'm sick of folks panicking and ignoring the fact that cis boys go through two or three years where their voices are fluctuating and cracking and changing before they settle.

Your voice isn't ruined, it's changing.

If you want to make that transition easier, you gotta keep using it. Sing! Even if your voice cracks in goofy ways. Even if you have trouble placing your voice comfortably. It gets easier, I promise. Get a voice teacher (if you can) who has experience with vocal changes for pubescent cis boys if it's really making you anxious or if you're having a hard time controlling it.

To be clear, I'm not trying to be dismissive of people's emotions, nor am I trying to tell you about your own experience. If you feel something intensely, that's fair and valid. Respectfully, you should unpack that with a therapist or supportive peers.

However, when one of the main TERF tactics against transmascs is convincing trans guys that T makes you Worse in a Variety of Ways, and that you'll be ruining your body if you take it, I am EXTREMELY dubious of how many people online report any part of their body being ruined by T. Sounds suspiciously like TERF shit. And, yes, even Actual Trans People can play into TERF talking points. I'm begging y'all to stop the rampant fearmongering surrounding T.

So, after nearly a year being on T, I'm here to say that YES my voice cracks and YES my voice fluctuates and YES sometimes it feels like I have to relearn everything I knew about being a vocalist, but goddamn if I won't have fun figuring it all out, because I know this is just one stage of the transition I'm going through, and it's worth it.

[spacelazarwolf]

thank you so much for this. i’m a professional singer who’s wanting to go on t but it’s IMPOSSIBLE to talk about it bc even other trans men and mascs keep peddling this “t ruins your voice you’ll have no range and will never be able to sing again” garbage. and it’s infuriating because i’ll make posts asking specifically people who are singers what their experience was, and people will show up to fearmonger about how their voice is ruined when they themselves admit they didn’t sing before t, didn’t have any training during the transition, and haven’t done much singing afterward.

and when i try to point out that i know several trans men who are still professional singers after transitioning people are always like “what makes you think you’ll be one of the lucky ones?” what makes you think i won’t????? i have over a decade of training and performance experience under my belt as well as teaching experience, which requires knowledge of the anatomy of changing voices. and tbh i’m furious that i was put off t for so many years because i was told i would have to give up singing when apparently what’s more likely is that i’ll just have to take some time off while my voice changes to retrain.

basically, there’s a shit ton of fearmongering around “t voice” and it’s kept me from going on t for literal years when t could save my life and i’m very mad about that.

[transmascrage]

There are multiple articles out there and all of them say going on T as a singer is safe, as long as you train your voice to change with you.

Transgender Men, Testosterone, and Singing: Some Advice

As a singer-songwriter and voice teacher who is an openly transgender man, I regularly get questions from people considering taking testoste

Testosterone and the FTM Singing Voice

The loss of singing ability on Testosterone is not inevitable, and there are ways to ease the transition of the FTM singing voice. Find out

Testosterone therapy may bring you closer to your gender identity, but how will it affect your singing voice? | CBC Music

A new short film, Voice Trans*formed, follows two classical singers taking testosterone as they find answers for themselves.

Men and women aren't two completely different species. It's not like a trans guy experiencing voice crack is something cis boys don't go through. Just because afab teenagers don't experience it, doesn't mean it's catastrophic for a trans guy.

Cis boys have the same issue and usually stop singing for a while, but continue singing after.

How to Sing When Going Through Puberty - OpenMic

Learning how to sing when going through puberty will prevent you from becoming frustrated and possibly even damaging your voice. Patience is

24 votes and 12 comments so far on Reddit

(I love this thread. All the educators are really careful and use affirming language for the kids they teach. A lot of them also say boys can be treated very harshly during this period, and it's probably very sudden for the kid. The belief (I fear) is that he's "becoming a man" so he shouldn't be helped or treated kindly anymore.

Never ever call it the voice "breaking". That implies that there is something wrong with the voice, when it is of course an absolutely natural transition. We call it the vocal transition or change.

I think this is cis women panicking because they'd never want to change their voice and feel the need to project on us, like always. And then it spreads to transmasc circles.

[spacelazarwolf]

^^^^!!!!!!!!!

[duckbunny]

ALKAHEST - Full Series

Start to finish. I sound great and I sound like myself.

[roach-works]

hey i'm going to chime in (ha ha) as someone who hated singing as a woman and who still doesn't sing well as a man: T gave me a singing voice i like to sing with. i sang in the car all the year my voice was changing, and it was terrible and it was fun, and i sound like if kermit the frog fucked the decemberists and that's cool with me, actually.

not everything T does to you is a blissful upgrade, but it sure as hell hasn't ruined any part of me. it's nice. this whole thing has just been nice.

[caramiaaddio]

I’d like to chime in as a music educator/voice teacher to just add some tips and tricks here!

Taking T in no way “ruins” your voice — that’s not what testosterone does to the body! Inside your larynx (your ‘voice box’) you have what we call the vocal folds, which are two flaps of skin that are very thin on the inside. They’re shaped kind of like a V, and when you put the folds close together and push air through, they vibrate and create sound! When you stretch them, the sound is higher, and when you loosen them, the sound is lower.

What testosterone does to the vocal folds is thicken them, which lowers the pitch of the sounds you make! When moving from thinner folds to thicker folds, there’s always going to be a period of adjustment — you have to remember, these are muscles, and new ones! They can often struggle to hold a certain pitch because your muscles are changing and functioning in a new way. This is what leads to voice cracks — your body is trying to put a pitch in head voice or chest voice when the new musculature indicates it should be elsewhere. The voice ‘cracking’ sound is literally just your voice switching rapidly between chest and head voice!

The period of time in which your vocal folds are still thickening and haven’t quite settled, you are referred to as a cambiata — essentially, an in-between voice. But that doesn’t mean you should stop singing! In fact, you should absolutely KEEP singing in order to get used to your new musculature and passagio (the places where your voice switches from chest to head and head to falsetto).

Tips for singing through your voice change as a cambiata:

1. It’ll take a while. Don’t rush it. It could be up to a couple years before your voice really settles

2. Don’t push your voice! There may be notes you could hit before that you no longer can or low notes that you’re almost able to hit but not quite — don’t force them! This is what actually does damage to the voice, because you end up grinding the vocal folds together, which can create friction and eventually callouses! If a note seems out of your reach, let it be! It’s better to not sing a note/switch octaves for that note than force it and end up damaging your voice.

3. Ranges! While you’re going through a voice change, it’s best to stick to the cambiata range of ~F3 to ~F4, and move lower/higher as it feels natural. Here’s a little video so you can actually hear what I mean!

4. Most importantly: keep singing! Your vocal muscles are like any other muscles, and they get stronger/weaker depending on how much you use them. It may feel awkward as you adjust to the changes just because you can’t actually see them, but I promise you it’s completely normal for your voice to do the things it’s doing! I mean hell — I’m a cis woman and my voice was lowered by testosterone during puberty, and I’m an opera singer now! It’s your body’s normal and natural reaction to testosterone, and it’s not going to ruin your voice.

Also just a side note while I’m here because I’m passionate about this — the human voice is not as gendered as people want it to be. I won’t rant on it here, but there as cis men who sing soprano (countertenors!) and cis women who sing tenor or lower (contralto — this is me!). Singing is absolutely not “boys are this and girls are this”, it’s a spectrum with a whole lot of overlap. If you’re a pre-T/no-T trans man? You’re a countertenor. It’s a real voice part, and is highly sought after in the world of classical singing. Just listen to this — it’s John Holiday, masculine as all hell, and he’s a countertenor.

And if you’re a trans woman? Well then you’re one of the beautiful and rare contraltos, women with deep voices who are ALSO very rare and highly sought after (not to brag or anything, but welcome to the club lol), just like the gorgeous Korneva Julia.

People really want voices to be binary, and they’re just…not. Real people who study the voice know that it’s SO much more complex and beautiful than that. Okay rant over lol

[charlemane]

From this interview with trans singer/songwriter Mal Blum:

"Interviewer: [...] There’s this whole narrative around testosterone and what it does to your voice. As someone who loves to belt at karaoke, I know it was something on my mind when I was deciding to start HRT. So I can only imagine how it impacts folks who sing professionally. Could you talk a bit about how those two things—making music professionally and going on T—affected each other?

Blum: Even people who aren’t singers for work or people who are just casual singers, like you’re saying with karaoke, they’re worried about losing their singing voice. It’s interesting just because I feel like transition is so much steeped in this cultural understanding of all the things that you stand to lose if you medically transition, but we don’t really think about as a larger cultural idea the things that you gain. [...] I can’t tell anybody what the right thing to do is for them. I did lose my old singing voice, but I got a new one. It’s hard because you don’t want to lose the thing that makes you happy. But for me—I don’t know, it wasn’t really making me happy."

[Emphasis added.]

[spacelazarwolf]

update: currently almost 8 months on t and i fucking love my voice.

[tojustforart]

Wild how the queer community has been fighting tooth and nail for generations to have some semblance of inclusion and just the desire to not be beaten, arrested, or killed for existing.

Then there is less than 10 years of policies put in place to help us start being treated more humanely and the Conservative party is like “Actually we rather you die again” openly and proudly.

Wild how allowing ppl to live has made them so angry and more open about their fascism.

Meanwhile half of the younger queers online are too preoccupied with terminology and gatekeeping fandom engagement while our country actively works to eradicate the community honing social media to propagate propaganda.

[tojustforart]

It is going to sound mean and im not gonna sugarcoat it:

Telling other lgbtqia members that using the term “queer” is problematic and bad is more aligned with conservative’s views of hiding and destroying queerness. When you get that gatekeeping towards your own community you are making it easier to break us apart.

[fivegoblins]

I was a young bisexual woman in the mid 90's, and there were serious discussions via zines and Usenet and in LGBT spaces about whether or not the word "queer" could be reclaimed and if it should be. I was very against "queer" back in the day because it had never been anything but a word to hurt me. Thirty years on I now use queer happily, and one of my primary takeaways from living through that time is that words don't matter as much as solidarity. Go ahead and spend three hours on Tumblr debating whether or not people inside our community should use specific words, but if someone from outside the LGBTQIA+ community comes for any of us, we must link arms and defend each other so we can go back to arguing semiotics later. Don't accept people dropping out of the block because they got theirs (looking at you, gay Republicans), keep solidarity for as long as it takes for all of us to be safe.

[thoughtportal]

[jackironsides]

@wastelesscrafts

[wastelesscrafts]

Thank you for tagging me!

This Tiktok is a good example of how to mend a seam using the ladder stitch.

[bisexualwario]