Founded in November of 2024, our mission is to uplift queer voices throughout the Carolinas through events, storytelling, and community connection. From drag shows to book clubs, from our magazine to our podcast, Queerolina is here to celebrate you.
Right now, it’s more important than ever to document that we are here. That we are thriving, creating, and existing. No matter how “normal” you think your life is, your story matters. You never know what piece of your journey might inspire someone else to stay here with us.
We want everyone’s voice. Your poetry, your business, your art, your words. They all belong here.
If you have any questions, reach out! We'd love to hear from you. 🏳️🌈
I’ve very recently joined a book club in my city and as far as I’m aware I’m the only lesbian in it. The girls all seem like they’re allies, but I’ve realized that the odds of any of them ever suggesting a lesbian book for our monthly read is low to zero. That made me realize that if I want to read lesbian protagonists in the book club, I’m gonna have to be the one to make the suggestion each time.
So I’m looking for recs of books that aren’t romance (though they can have romance as a secondary plot, just not the main thing) but have a lesbian lead. All of us love thrillers, so my first suggestion was We Used To Live Here by Marcus Kliewer, but I’ll need more options for the following months.
I’m open to any genre (though the ones I love most are thrillers, historical and fantasy). If anyone can help I’ll be super thankful!
View on Reddit
Originally shared by VampireCowboys on r/LesbianBookClub on July 7th, 2026 at 1:34 PM UTC.
I will forever swear by Sheila Jenné’s Imperial Mars trilogy. GREAT science fiction, that has some interesting things to say about society and how we chose to organize it. The first books, Black Sails to Sunward can be read as a stand-alone if you are fine with an open ending and missing most of the actual story.
Justinia Ireland’s Dread Nation duology is some absolutely amazing horror, and has much to say about racism. But the first book also has a very open ending, so I am not sure how well it would work for a book club.
Chuck Tingle’s Camp Damascus also has a lesbian lead, if you are into horror.
Literally fiction, I always recommend The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (about how hard it is to be a genernonconforming queer woman at the beginning of the 20th century. Focus is on the character’s social isolation, her romances serve to stress that. Also, it is the only book on this list that is in the Public Domain, and therefore available for free online), Another Love by Galgóczi Erzsébet (Hungarian society in the 1950’s), and The Tree and the Vine by Dola de Jong (early Dutch lesbian novel set shortly before the Second World War, but check how heavy it is on romance, as I haven’t read it yet myself).
Trans activist Marsha P Johnson was the founder of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, which provided a home, legal aid, and other support to homeless trans youth. She would readily give away her belongings or her last dollar to those who asked, and is remembered by those her knew her for her kindness and generosity.
#my wife is on the SOR for being gay #no joke #she hit on a girl in a straight bar once #in 1997 #and while the girl was into it #the off duty cop sitting nearby was not #and so he arrested her for ‘soliciting homosexual activity’ #which in our state was still a felony #in 1997 (and would remain so until Lawrence v Texas in 2003) #and since ‘soliciting homosexual activity’ was a felony and a sex crime #she got put on The List #she is still on there to this day #because it costs MONEY to ask a judge to take you off #and she has tried four times#since 2003 #to get taken off the SOR #but every time the judge has said something like ‘no you pled guilty to the crime i can’t possibly take you off the sex offender registry’ #with no acknowledgement of what the actual crime was #(the crime of being a butch lesbian hitting on a cute girl who was into it) #(in 1997)
Reposting these tags with consent from the person that wrote them. The post about the Sex Offenders Registry is locked, but these tags are too important to go unnoticed.
Younger queer people need to realize that the SOR being used against queer people simply for being queer isn’t some ancient history thing. It still impacts queer people today. And it can quite easily be used that way again.
When you hear people throwing around the talking point of “well there’s a high rate of sex offenders in the trans/queer community”, this has to do with why.
Being on the sex offender registry isn’t inherently equivalent to whatever horrific sex crime you’re meant to think of when it’s mentioned. It evokes imagery of pedophilia and rape, but there is a lot that can get you put on it and not a lot you can do to be taken off of it.
Public crossdressing used to be able to get you put on the sex offender registry (and by used to I mean as recently as 2011).
Public urination (you know, the literal only option for someone who’s homeless and doesn’t have access to public bathrooms, a venn diagram where trans people are more likely to rest in the meeting zone) can get you put on the sex offender registry.
Sex work is pretty much an automatic way to end up on the sex offender registry if you’re caught. (This is especially weaponized against black trans women who do sex work)
“Deviant Sexual Intercourse” (aka literally any sexual activity aside from penis-in-vagina penetration) could get you on the sex offender registry as recently as the early 2000s. That effectively impacts the entire queer community in one way or another.
The sex offender registry is, first and foremost, useless. It tells you nothing about what someone did. It’s mentioned to quickly associate a person or a group of people with the worst possible crimes imaginable.
It has been used against us time after time and it will continue to be used for that.
When you decide that people who commit a certain crime or category of crime should legally lose their humanity, you create incentive for more people to be charged with that crime.
I am so unbelievably tired of seeing TMA/TME being treated like transfeminist praxis or as anything other than exclusionary and reductive. It’s simply ineffective at everything positive it claims to be made for.
Even IF it wasn’t used to be disparaging towards anyone not a perisex binary trans woman or fem, there are better words (transfeminized, for example) to describe the people targeted by transmisogyny or how people assumed to be transfem are treated, without (pt: without) creating a binary that makes claims on other people’s experiences, makes suffering synonymous with trans identity, forces people to disclose their identity, refusing to acknowledge nuance, implying large groups of people are inherently oppressors, or downplaying other forms of oppression.
I have repeatedly seen people called TME just for disliking the terms, even those who are trans women. It’s transparently a way to describe an in-group/out-group. Any use they have is a facade. The moment there’s an “acceptable” group to wish violence and death upon, people will make excuses to put anyone they dislike into that group.
Put these terms down and leave them in the dust, and accept your fellow trans person. You don’t have to like every person ever, or even anybody, but you HAVE to treat them with basic decency. No one is less important than you.
i used to be a sad boy that lost his passion for reading and now im a cute dyke with glasses reading books on the train and blushing when pretty girls smile at me from across the car
i used to be so sad and so miserable and so scared. Now i get to be a pretty girl in public and other girls see me and smile and we compliment each other and it's normal and im happy.
im so fucking happy, even when life sucks, im fucking happy.
A while ago I had a very exhausting conversation with someone under one of my posts that perfectly summed up, why the TMA/TME binary is harmful. The person self-identified as TME and they have deleted their comments, probably because they realised that leaving evidence of being a bigot is not a smart idea, so I will have to paraphrase.
It started with the comment "lets not pretend like cis men are discriminated against", in the assumption that I was a trans man. I know that they assumed this because when I told them that it was "brave" to post this under the post of a cis intersex man, they became very upset and asked why I, as a cis man, was posting about the experiences of trans men.
I proceeded to tell them that I am talking about these experiences, because I have had the same or very similar experiences due to being intersex.
At that point they decided to tell me, that I was not actually cis then, but trans, and that I just didn't understand my own identity.
I had told them multiple times at that point, that I originally had been AMAB, and only reassigned AFAB to enable my IGM. This user was pretty much saying: trans means transitioning away from your AGAB, you have trans man experiences, so you are a trans man, so the doctors were actually right to reassign you AFAB. They were at this point agreeing with my abusers just because my experiences did not match their expectation of what experiences a cis man can have.
And that is the danger of TME/TMA and why it will never have any validity in my eyes. You are assuming the amount and type of oppression a person experiences based on their AGAB. And if that doesn't match up in your eyes, you assume that a) they are lying or b) that they are to stupid to understand their own identity.
They also half way implied that I no longer identified as trans because I was transphobic and not because I learned about circumstances of my birth and lifelong medical treatment that had been maliciously hidden from me.
The person later gave in and apologized, but then immediately invalidated that, by replying to another intersex user who came to my defense that "we don't get to tell them that TMA/TME is intersexist". A perisex trans person telling two intersex people what they are allowed to call intersexist. That is the state this stupid binary has left the trans community on tumblr. In the end users of this binary believe to have the authority over others experiences and identity. And that is fucking despicable.
Not gonna lie this makes me a bit irritated. Here's the real version of this photo:
Instead of a cutesie reference to film censorship it was an explicit statement of defiance of Maryland's criminalization gay sex, which was not repealed until 2002. This wasn't a guy saying "Oh they can't put what I do in the movies according to a completely voluntary industry code" he was saying "The State of Maryland wants to put me in jail for being gay and having gay sex."
It wasn't a guy being cheeky about sex in an ambiguous, cute way. It was a man stating, in no uncertain terms, that a whole state of the United States considered him a criminal for being homosexual.
This is about the sexiness of The Golden Girls but I really feel the need to remind the world of how fucking progressive this show was.
In the episode 72 hours, we find out Rose may have contracted AIDs during an emergency gallbladder surgery.
Rose: Why me, Blanche? I'm tired of pretending I feel okay so you won't say, 'Take it easy', and I'm tired of you saying 'Take it easy' because you're afraid I'm going to fall apart. Dammit, why is this happening to me? I mean, this isn't supposed to happen to people like me. You must've gone to bed with hundreds of men. All I had was one innocent operation.
Blanche: Hey, wait a minute! Are you saying this should be me and not you?
Rose: No! No, I'm just saying that I am a good person. Hell, I'm a goody-two-shoes!
Blanche: AIDS is not a bad person's disease, Rose, it is not God punishin' people for their sins!
In Isn't it romantic? we find out Dorothy's childhood best friend is a lesbian who recently lost her partner. She confesses she has feelings for Rose. Rose turns her down but makes it clear that she still wants to be friends even though she doesn't return those feelings.
Sophia: Jean is a nice person. She happens to like girls instead of guys. Some people like cats instead of dogs.
Jean: Rose, about last night. I should never have said anything.
Rose: You only said what you were feeling.
Jean: It's just that this last year has been so difficult for me. Pat was the person I planned to spend the rest of my life with. And when she died, I just felt so terribly alone. Empty. I thought I could never care for anyone again. Until I met you. I just got very confused. I hope I didn't make you uncomfortable.
Rose: Well, I have to admit that I don't understand these kinds of feelings. But if I did understand, if I were, you know, like you, I'd be very flattered and proud that you thought of me that way.
Ebbtide's Revenge gives us Phil's funeral, and Sophia addressing him wearing women's clothes.
Rose: So what if he was different? It's okay that you loved him.
Sophia: I did love him. He was my son, my little boy. But every time I saw him I wondered what I did, what I said, when was the day I did whatever I did to make him the way he was.
Angela Petrillo: What he was Sophia, was a good man.
Sister of the Bride, where Blanche's brother Clayton brings his boyfriend to town, because they're planning on getting married.
Blanche: Oh, look, I can accept the fact that he's gay, but why does he have to slip a ring on this guy's finger so the whole world will know?
Sophia: Why did you marry George?
Blanche: We loved each other. We wanted to make a lifetime commitment. Wanted everybody to know.
Sophia: That's what Doug and Clayton want, too. Everyone wants someone to grow old with. And shouldn't everyone have that chance?
There are so many episodes I could sit here and quote but this show is still so important. It isn't perfect, there are jokes that definitely don't land that I will not sit here and defend, but in the context of when it was created? This show is a fucking masterpiece and deserves respect for that.
Her cool, cultured, interesting friend starts to show who she really is when she wants to take Dorothy out to a nice place... but no Jews allowed. This was not uncommon IRL. Perfectly acceptable, even.
I never in my life want to hear about Boomers not being "progressive" ever again.
It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.
But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.
To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.
San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.
Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.
Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.
Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.
Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.
When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.
He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.
It was a mistake that would change American history.
Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.
She saw "her kids."
She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.
Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.
She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.
So, she made a choice.
She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.
Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.
The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.
She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.
She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.
"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."
And it did.
Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.
Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."
For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.
She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.
She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."
By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.
In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.
This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.
One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."
They underestimated who they were dealing with.
They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.
When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.
It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.
Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.
She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.
Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.
"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."
The quote ran in newspapers across the country.
The court didn't stand a chance.
Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.
The charges were dropped.
Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.
She needed to change the law.
August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.
She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.
But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.
She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.
She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.
In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.
It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.
She never got rich.
She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.
She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.
Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.
Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.
Most of them have never heard of Mary.
They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.
They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.
They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.
Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."
She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.
She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.
She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.
Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.
It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.
It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.
Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.
Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.
Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana." Weird Everything, FB december 12, 2025
I'd be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named "Mary Jane," but also, that's a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.
What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren't AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.
Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.
The first thing I did was search for "Brownie Mary" and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.
Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don't want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.
The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.
Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn't have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)
Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.
...or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.
I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.
My search string of "Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun" hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!
She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.
The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I've now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.
The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let's hook onto that and see what we get.
Searching for "Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980" gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!
We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:
...wow. I should see if my library has that!
The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I'd already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.
There's a lot of information out there, and it's worth digging into. Otherwise it's altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.
A witch puts a spell on a girl, a sleeping spell that promises the girl shall wake through true love’s kiss. Men come and kiss her. She slumbers. Women come and press their lips to hers, but still she sleeps. Many years past, and the girl remains still. One bright morning, a lost little boy finds her resting spot and clears the dust and grime from her face. He offers her a kiss on her forehead, and her eyes flutter open. She never feels romantic love for a man nor a woman, and she cares for the boy until the day she dies.
A young woman is imprisoned in a castle by a monstrously formed prince. The servants of the castle hope for them to fall in love, and when the spell is broken they assume their prayers have been answered. They are all surprised, but nonetheless pleased, when it is revealed to them that the young woman and prince are the truest of friends, and nothing more.
They say the kingdom is ruled by an evil queen, a woman who is incapable of loving. She is unmarried, she has no consorts, and she wishes for no partner. She is the wretched queen, the heartless queen. She must hate her daughter, for her daughter is beautiful, and women are incapable of liking another woman who’s prettier than themselves. It must be for this reason that the princess was sent away, not for how she was attacked by a man in the woods. They say the kingdom is ruled by an evil queen because she cannot love. The queen loves her daughter, and that is enough for them both.
There lives a prince who is forced to choose a bride at the ball. He meets many beautiful women, but find none which he loves. He spies one in a gorgeous gown and wonder in her eyes, and he dances with her all night long. The kingdom is sure he has found his bride. When the clock strikes midnight he tells her how he will never love a woman, or a man, in the way he is expected to. The beautiful woman smiles and tells him she expects nothing from him. The next morning the prince and the beautiful woman are missing, having run off together to see the world. They leave their shoes behind in their haste.
Many kinds of love exist. It doesn’t all have to be romantic.
(Image description: the asexual, aromantic, queer chevron, polyamory, pansexual, intersex, leather, more color more pride, trans, and genderqueer pride flags with the words “the future of pride is radically inclusive” centered in white text.)
Amazing awesome but please…. please remove the polyamorous flag and the leatyer pride flag…. having multiple, opposite sex partners does not make a person LGBT and kink does not make someone LGBT…. it just makes me really uncomfortable to see kink flags mixed in with LGBT flags…
If this post makes you uncomfortable, I feel like I should warn you about what frequently happens at Pride events….
Kinky and polyamorous queer people exist and there is great overlap between the histories of the communities. I won’t be removing the flags from this post and I won’t stop including them in the future, obviously.
Ah, yes, I see someone has fallen into the age-old trap of believing that the LGBTQ+/Queer movement is about certain specific types of people, types of people that they like and approve of, getting better treatment.
No.
The LGBTQ+/Queer movement is about breaking down the cisheteropatriarchal monoculture which believes that there is One Right And Good Way To Be.
According to the Traditional Values camp, there is exactly one way of living your life. That is, you will conform to Your Gender, and it will define you. You will have the socially accepted amount of sex with the socially accepted partner for your gender, and you will do it within the socially accepted type of relationship. You will date a single person of the opposite gender until you either break up or get married (and if you break up, you will immediately begin looking for your next partner). Any sex you have will be “normal” sex–not kinky or daring or boundary-pushing in any way. You will get married and have kids. You will put your spouse above all other relationships except your kids. At all times, everything about your relationships and your gender and your way of living in the world will be Normal And Good.
If you do not live your life according to this model, you are Bad and Wrong.
The Traditional Values camp hates the poly people and the “straight” kinksters exactly as much as they hate lesbians, gays, transgender, aro, and intersex people.
If you want to determine which kinds of “not normative” people are Good and deserve better treatment, all you are doing is replicating the Traditional Values camp, but with a rainbow flag pasted on.
"TME/TMA are useful in concept but I just don't like how they are being used."
I will hold your hand when I say this, no. No they are not even useful in concept.
They are terms that frame our trans identities through our suffering and oppression while also creating an "oppressed" and "privileged" binary that doesn't actually work in reality.
POC don't use the term "racism affected" to define themselves because, firstly and very importantly, "racism affected" is already implied when they identify themselves as POC. Secondly, there is more to their identity then the oppression they suffer from.
If these boxes simply mean "transfem" and "not transfem" like many people claim then why can't we just say that? Being transfeminine already implied that you are effected by transmisogyny. Why do we have to use boxes that lump trans men and nonbinary people with cis people and treat them like they have the same privilege?
I understand why people are trying to find a middle ground with radfems but we shouldn't pretend like this system they created actually has merit and is reflective of reality.
The only reason I can see for someone wanting to define themselves by their oppression and suffering, while also denying the suffering of others, is to feed their victim complex and to compensate for other privileges they have.
