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my FAQ (currently updating!!!):

If you wanna know my viewpoints please click the read more. If you wanna send me an ask please read this to see if it's already answers. Thanks!! (Will be edited as I get new questions asked).

#discourse #faq #opinions #my faq #frequently asked questions

mossworth

Guys, queers. Specifically my fellow queers.

I work at a library. We do this thing where, every so often, we weed the collection. It hurts to see books go, but it's necessary to make sure there's room in the library for new materials.

I have seen so much support for the library in text, and I've seen folks pass around those beautiful "queer your library" flyers. Keep doing that. That's great. Nothing wrong with that. But you HAVE to turn your words into action. We MUST remember to actually go to our local organizations and libraries and actually, with our own fucking hands, interact with these materials we want to see more of.

My branch is medium-sized for a library, maybe a little small. We don't have as many materials as I'd like, but we have fundamentals. Tell me why, even with all the verbal support I've gotten from my local community for the library as a resource for our LGBT+ community, every single trans biography and a good chunk of our vaguely queer theory books were on the list. This isn't a scheme to take the books off the shelves, it isn't another bigoted American governmental push. The only thing we look at when we weed is how long it's been since the last time the item was checked out.

Three years.

No one in my community interacted in any meaningful way with the few books on trans life and history we physically had on the shelves for three fucking years.

I promise you the materials you want and need are there, but this isn't a horde. This isn't a static safety net. You have to use them. You MUST use them or, in the future, maybe in three years, they *won't* be there anymore.

This isn't a vague post, there's no one person I'm hinting at or calling out. I'm not even talking directly to anyone who's directly in my line of sight. I just want everyone to hear this. Big library, small library, whatever. Doesn't matter. Please, we cannot be losing our shelf visibility like this.

alanfromrochester

I work in a different library and can confirm, it's a decision based on popularity not censorship

we're big enough to have lots of shelf space but still have the problem on a different scale. We do have a back storage room rather than completely getting rid of some things, but having to ask for that might be a barrier for sensitive subject matter and prevent people from casually stumbling across something of interest

paintedpigeon1

Yep. Different library worker here, we weeded adult non-fiction recently bc it's most rarely used and we needed to clear a bookshelf of space, and there were a decent number of queer books on the list. Thankfully not all of them, but some (we had a lot lol). Our criteria is also no borrows in 3yrs. I can't borrow the whole list by myself. I do try to get these books in, and the local authority are happy to buy them, but we need space for new books every so often and we can't keep everything forever! If you want them, you have to use them!

(incidentally, the whole list was 35 pages long, which... please borrow the books you want people)

qbdatabase

I didn't have time to comment the first time I reblogged, but I can add now:

I'm also a librarian and queer books are almost always cut first when we have to weed for space or prioritize new releases over old items because no one reads them

I will say, when I worked at a large downtown location, we had a "browsing card" that we would check out items we found taken off the shelf and left on a table, as an example of a book that had clearly been read, just not checked out by anyone

it's possible queer books do actually get a bit of unfair treatment in this regard because people may be nervous or outright scared to check them out onto an account with their name on it. so they get browsed at a much higher rate, but if a library doesn't have a specific system in place (or need for it) to count browsed items, then it looks like they aren't being used and they get weeded

for other librarians, a browsing card is a great idea if you have enough staff for the extra work / enough items left out to justify it

for patrons, check out queer books even if you don't read them! you're not lying or committing any type of fraud. you're keeping books on the shelf long enough for pride season when people are interested in checking them out again and for people scared to use their own accounts or who don't have library cards

for anyone nervous about using their library card, libraries do not keep search histories of what you check out!! this means even if the government does come back with a warrant, *wet farting noise* too bad! it doesn't exist!

so please check out queer books!

vtothefun

I have to wonder how often they aren't checked out because those in an exploratory period may not feel safe enough for them to go home with them, too. Kids, for example, or folks who have ended up in a het marriage that... Doesn't feel like it's quite right (or may be physically abusive).

mossworth

This is most definitely one of the causes of this. That's why it's so important for folks who *can* to *do*.

It feels like such a small thing, but all movements are made up of small things! We have this mindset that in order to get everything done, everyone must be doing their (or *the*) absolute best at all times. But not everyone can do the same things, to the same degree, with the same amount of productivity or success. Not everyone can; sometimes, they're the ones that need help. Sometimes people just need help.

This post is very much so intended for the people who can. I've seen a lot of replies from folks who say they don't have to (or don't think about) checking out or requesting queer books from the library specifically because they *can* buy them, can pirate them, or already have them in their house or on their computers or phones. But in instances like that, keeping these books in circulation is less for you and more for the people who can't. The folks who come to the library, who don't have access to internet--or even electricity--at home and would never--have never--been able to interact with this "ubiquitous queer community" we have here online who has made so many of these. materials so avaliable to the rest of us.

And... if I can be a little frank. Sometimes the hyperaccessibility of these materials online (through pirating, cheap e-book copies, etc) gives people a false sense of security. It implies that these things are an infinate resource, good for "When I get around to it".

And often, you won't. There's so much to read and so much to do. So much to download and so much to sit down and stare at for hours. That kind of mental scope puts books in people's hands (or phones), but never in their heads.

But the moment your favorite document archival site gets knocked offline for breaching copyright or your go-to mega corporate audiobook distributor decides it doesn't want "those" materials anymore, what's left? What did you download? What information did you internalize? Did you ever get around to it? If you did, great, but what good does that do for the person who didn't? Are you going to be the one to redistribute that information? Are you going to communicate it in the place of the author whose words are no longer publically accesible or, mostly avaliable, but only behind hefty paywalls and financial gatekeeping? How would someone else get a hold of it? How could they, if they wanted?

vtothefun

This is excellent info.

What are some good books to check out for those who can?

mossworth

Gosh... there's so many options. I wouldn't know where to start without knowing who I'm talking to and what they're looking for. What I can recommend is for folks to check out creators like @makingqueerhistory who have spent just a ridiculously beautiful amount of time collecting queer history and book lists! You'll find something in seconds reading their page.

Personal pitch: I liked the books Tar Hollow Trans and Gay Poems for Red States. Both great.

makingqueerhistory

I'm glad I was tagged in this because it means I can cosign (and also add a little nugget of info).

I live in a province that is currently trying to ban queer books from libraries, and as a library patron, this is terrifying. 95% of the books I read are from the library and a lot of them are way out of my budget to buy personally.

Making Queer History would not exist without the school library I skipped class in to write articles. It would not exist without my friends with library cards for their universities sharing them and getting me access to rare texts. I would not be able to read as much as I do without Libby and Hoopla. If I have ever given you a book recommendation, know that I likely got it from the library first.

I cannot overstate the importance of protecting libraries and checking out queer books. And I want to say thank you to everyone above for being as passionate as I am about queer books in libraries.

Love y'all <3

allthefoolmine

@official-library-posts

official-library-posts

official library post

gaslit-dipshits

appalachian-werewolf

Follow the money behind America's data center boom. Track 2,300+ projects, PAC spending, and the politicians who sign off on it.

reasonsforhope

Reasons for hope: Lots of amazing people did a ton of work to make this fantastic, fully interactive resource available - because no matter how bleak things seem, there are millions, and millions of people doing everything they can to protect both the world and their own communities.

You can use this to view and subscribe to updates, project statuses, and for at least some of them even whole dossiers. This is an amazing resource, I highly recommend checking it out

cheshire-cat-talks

theangryman

it really feels like TERFism as “feminism” is disconnected from responding to actual current events

you can see it in the reposts of decade old r/MTF posts and the fact that yall still glaze Rowling for things she half assed five years ago (and turn a blind eye to the financial support of Johnny Depp)

like, idk. on Facebook i’m getting mainstream evangelical pastors advocating for the abolition of women’s right to vote, attacks on abortion that extend to trying to ban care for ectopic pregnancy, hell, just saw one advocating polygyny so that a man wouldn’t be “controlled” by a woman

and these aren’t just fringe views. these are the things that Pete Hegseth’s pastor is advocating. the military has been actively purging women

there’s talk about taking away immigrants bank accounts - if that infrastructure is put in place, how easy would it be to turn that on women?

if they can revoke trans drivers licenses, can’t they revoke women’s?

but instead of talking about REALITY, “radical feminists” here are hyper fixated on the existence of trans people. trans people have no political power in the U.S. and UK, and i really doubt elsewhere

is the “threat” that a trans woman might be pissing in a stall next to you that dire?

it’s soooo easy to turn the reproductive health thing into an attack on a lot of other things. remember how they were saying Tylenol causes autism? how easy it would be to take meds away from pregnant women, then woman who can become pregnant, than all women “just in case”

it seems this “radical feminist” movement isn’t really “radical” or “feminist”

it’s a distraction

think about how Fox News broadcasts a constant wheel of immigrants doing bad things. how the murder of a white woman by a Mexican man will become the media cycle

and the reason for this - so they can justify atrocities. “oh you want open borders? you want evil cartel members to murder and rape white women?”

so they can justify the camps. so they can justify attacking civil rights (for everyone)

TERFism is a conservative ideology at its base, because it is a fear based ideology. it is about being afraid of the evil trans women, so afraid that you’ll be okay with massive violations of your privacy

Idaho Solicitor General Michael Zarian said law enforcement won't necessarily need a warrant either.

are we okay with this? do you want the government to have your genetics?

are you willing to trade your privacy to not be around trans women? are you willing to trade your ability to be GNC in public?

why are your politics based on fear? i’d take this movement more seriously if there was anything being done FOR women

where is the fight for equal pay? where is the campaign to certify the ERA? where is the fight for reproductive justice?

i keep being told “oh we can focus on more than one thing” but where is the evidence?

when do we get to the feminism?

myragewillendworlds

In one of your very early posts (10 yrs ago I think) you were asking yourself if it's ethical for trans women or transexual people in general to not disclose it to their partner.

Did you get an answer for yourself for that? Imo this mostly matters from the transsexual person perspective since you probably wouldn't want to be with someone who doesn't understand/ respect that. Postponing the disclosure is also possible to not scare anyone away? Or was that meant in a casual context?

I genuinely believe we need to move in a direction where we don't consider transsexualism some weird little freak thing that maybe-hopefully-sometimes open-minded people are willing to tolerate. It needs to be universally understood as what it is: a biological, developmental mishap, a birth defect if you will (which I don't consider an insulting choice of words).

Saying transsexual women are women is not some radical left-wing take, it's an acknowledgement of what's neurologically present at birth, and it's as radical as saying women with various intersex conditions are women. Ideally, we'd call it something similar too; a woman with a transsexual condition, not "a transsexual".

Someone not finding bulky, masculine-looking women attractive makes no difference for whether the woman in question is transsexual are not. There are also tons of feminine, conventionally attractive, physically female(-appearing) transsexual women that the most staunch transphobe would find attractive — up until the point they hear she's transsexual. It's got nothing to do with her actual body.

That's all to say that I hate how this subject is treated so differently from any other thing you might need to disclose to your partner. If you have a physical disability, a different birth defect, or just a good ol' "weird thing on my body" situation, you might also want/need to disclose that at some point. This isn't any different, in that you do need to disclose that you can't produce/bear children, you had genital constructive surgery or need a device to get an erection, and certainly if you currently don't have the type of body your partner is expecting. But those are physical things. Not some fucking philosophical admission. You're not "guilty" of anything.

And I hate that people are all asking themselves and each other whether they "would date a transsexual?" I'm so tired of transsexualism being, you know, A Thing. A Gross Thing, even. A sinful Thing, an ethical Thing, a philosophical debate, a Thing that victimizes the other. When none of that matters once you meet a cute girl or a handsome guy that you're really into, head to toes, and then when it turns out that this person you find wildly attractive was born with some physical defect, that's the moment you can decide for yourself whether that situation impacts your potential future together or not.

As for when I think is the best time to disclose that information: I would advise people to let others get to know you first before you label yourself (and that goes for labels other than "transsexual" for that matter). I would also generally advise to let someone really get to know and see you as your actual gender, and (as far as you want to do this) let someone see your (presumably transitioned) body to further cement that mental image of you. You know, go to second base. Just also make sure you do so with someone that doesn't hate transsexual people.

As for a casual sex context (which I think that original post was about), if your body doesn't require a conversation before dropping the clothes, you don't need to disclose. If they see your body and are okay with that body, the label is irrelevant to mention.

This could have been a shorter answer, but fuck it.

#good soup #food for thought

dashaibo

recoveredcombatsister

its a real shame we cant talk about gendered socialization as the violence that it is without some fuckass rocking up like "and thats why trans women arent women!"

recoveredcombatsister

like children gendered as girls are fed less and given less opportunities to play and make messes, and children gendered as boys are offered less help and given less emotional support, and this is hurting them! but no actually we need to stop trannies from using the womens washroom

toloveviceforitself

The thing missing from the transphobic analysis is that children gendered as one but perceived to conform more to the other (or to "fail" at their gendered socialization) tend to get a sampler-pack of the worst of both, plus a bunch of outright abuse on top.

mephistopheles

yall i swear to god if a bitch says her pronouns are she/her then her pronouns are she/her

mephistopheles

my close friend from uni was a cis girl who had the audacity to wear pants and cut her hair short and like nobody at this school, a place OBSESSED with ‘respecting everyone’s gender identities,’ would call her ‘she.’ after MONTHS of this she started wearing a fucking pronoun pin to work and i dont even think that fixed it. me, im sorta androgynous; i have shaggy self-cut hair and go by a neutral name, but i always say my pronouns are she/her, and people ive worked with for months and have introduced myself in front of fifty times will STILL reflexively say ‘they’ for me. i respect the progressive circles i run in, but this IS evidence of misogyny. people’s definition of “woman” or “girl” is so narrow and high-maintenance that even the tiniest deviation from the norm gets you forcibly defeminized. but it’s a compliment, right? like who would wanna be a girl anyway?

mephistopheles

replacing an inescapable gender binary with an equally-inescapable gender trinary is stupid 🩷

#food for thought #real things Ive seen

mysweetoddbird

i actually do think too much emphasis is placed on regret rates in the trans community despite said rates being absurdly low. like even if regret rates were at 90% id still support access to gender affirming care because i think people have the right to do whatever the fuck they want with their own bodies. regret is the price you pay for autonomy man get over it.

transsexualsmatter

when I was a teen I was wayy more active in online transmed spaces, and something I encountered a lot was people telling me that I needed to spend more time in irl LGBT spaces because then I'd "realize how stupid transmedicalism is". and that never made sense to me. because I was already very active in irl LGBT spaces. in fact, I wasn't a transmed before I started spending time in those spaces.

i was actually heavy into tucute ideology when I first came out as trans. like, not only did I support MOGAI/xenogender bullshit, I also had about a dozen micro-labels I identified with AND I had blogs/social media dedicated to that stuff. it wasn't until I started interacting in irl LGBT spaces that I realized how stupid all that stuff was and ended up turning to transmedicalism.

#like #there's something to say about letting people define themselves #and that there's no one way to be trans #without denying the actual science that makes society acknowledge us #or that isnt encouraging labeling every little part of yourself in a way that forces you to analyze things that prob dont need to be #and or arent actually labels

scramratz

I don’t like how I’m kinda expected to rewrite the first 20 years of my life just because I’m trans. I was the eldest daughter in a black household. I can’t go back and edit my history to say I was the eldest son, cuz that doesn’t accurately convey the certain standards I was held to. I was the only girl in my engineering class. I can’t leave out the “girl” part. It recontextualizes the entire situation. I don’t think either of those facts invalidates my current gender and I don’t think trans people should be expected to rewrite their own history in fear of that

klapollo

like the fact that PrEP and PEP just kinda became a normal part of life one day without fanfare is something I think about a lot. Thousands of people died gruesome horrible deaths and now when I go on Reddit or ride the subway I see dinky little ads like "start this medication today so you don't contract/spread HIV! and if you get accidentally exposed there's a different medication for that to keep yourself from contracting!" and it's just an everyday thing. all those people who died fought for it to be this way.

rootingformephistopheles

I feel it would be good to have a word that's like not ragebait but shamebait, where you can read a post and just go 'ah, this person just wants me to feel ashamed of myself and is not engaging with the issue in a constructive or useful way. I do not have to participate in this actually' and like. move on with your day

dramatic-dolphin

it's actually so funny that all you need to do as a female athlete to be immediately disqualified is being good, because everyone knows women suck ass at everything and if a woman is good at something that's unnatural. hashtag feminism hashtag protect women.

briannyssey

everything surrounding the id laws that just passed in Kansas is fucking horrible

briannyssey

terramythos

Hey Bri I hope you don't mind me sharing this on your post but in case anyone reading this is in Kansas or knows trans people in Kansas, Colorado is nearby and considered one of the safest states for trans & queer people. I know relocating is logistically expensive and challenging for many reasons, especially for people in a vulnerable situation, but if it is an option anyone is considering, there is a nonprofit here that may be able to help.

Steps These steps are intended to be a linear process to get you out of there and resettled here. But we get it, you’re a big kid and can do

self-control-whats-that

@i-add-sources

i-add-sources

Law demanding IDs match ‘sex at birth’ also includes bathroom ban provision for trans people in public buildings

Some transgender Kansans are considering leaving the state after Republicans overrode a veto to pass the law.

"The legislature did not include a grace period."

Original post Feb 26, 2026. Factcheck Feb 27, 2026

Kansas has invalidated diver's licences of anyone who has had their gender/sex marker changed

There is no grace period, meaning as of yesterday, no-one with a changed gender marker is allowed to drive until they can get themselves to a dmv and switch back to a card with an incorrect marker.

elierlick

There is still time. It's never too late to transition.

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