People really need to take a wider view of this paranoia about age gaps and realise this is how we lose the ability to build communities. You need to be able to realise that people can have things in common with you even if they grew up in a different time/place/culture. You also need to realise you can build communities with people who don’t have obvious things in common with you, that people can have the same goals and needs as you even if in most ways they’re very unlike you. Now, more than ever, we need to be able to work together to have any chance to stand ip against the few who have so, so much more power, money and influence than any of us do individually. We need to form communities that reach across age (and class and race and sexuality and so on…).
This is one of those topics I feel very strongly about and agree completely with the points in this post.
I struggle to make fandom friends on Tumblr, and sometimes I worry that it is because people in their 20s think they can't be friends with someone in their 40s. That I'm uncool, weird, cringe, intimidating, or just too different from them.
But things don't change as much with age as most think. Older people still are silly, awkward, overwhelmed, enthusiastic, confused, playful, irresponsible, obsessive, dumb, cool, horny, and all these other things young people think we stop feeling or being as we get older. We're just humans. I am really great friends with someone on here more than 20 years younger than me because we have so much in common! You can't tell that we're different ages when we chat.
And also—you can be friends with people who you do NOT have much in common with! Because fundamentally, you always have humanity in common.
Years ago, there was this lady in my community who was maybe 30 years older than me and who I knew was far more conservative than me. I dismissed her as someone I didn't want to spend any time with because she was obviously too different than me. But, I was forced to spend some time with her (long story), and guess what? I became really good friends with her! Because I found out I was wrong about all those things that made her different than me? NO! I was right about that—she was just as annoyingly conservative as I had suspected. BUT that wasn't the whole of her person. She was so much richer than that. There were lots of things I didn't know about her. A few of those things were commonalities, but overall, we still didn't have much in common—but that didn't matter. We could still be kind to each other, help each other, respect each other, even enjoy each other's company if we stuck to topics where we didn't clash too badly. I feel really bad for judging her, and I'm so glad I gave her a chance.
So yes, please make friends with people who are not your same age. You probably have more in common than you think, and even if you don't, that doesn't matter. We're all humans and we need each other. Our communities need us to get along.
The constant framing of an older person interacting with a younger person as something with clearly predatory intent is a huge part of the problem. Learn to spot actual grooming behavior and patterns, don't substitute a difference in age for your actual judgment. This pedojacketing shit has to stop. We were not meant to stick to only socializing with people within two years of our own age. That is not how you have a functioning society.
Also, we built these sites and all the source material for your fandoms. Stop acting like it's weird for us to be in our own damn houses. Learn to talk to people older than you. Go learn to quilt.
The US is detransitioning prisoners and just announced that ICE can detain trans people on suspicion of visa fraud. The UK just banned all care for trans kids and is now conducting an "evidence review" into HRT for trans adults and now the biggest DIY HRT web resource just went down.
Trans people need to learn solidarity yesterday, we need to be ready to organise together and set aside anything that we need to in order to get our shit sorted out. Cis people need to take it seriously that the fascists are trying to completely extinguish transess from existence
Crazy thing to say when it was immigrant trans men & masculine queer people perceived female who were the targets of a forced labor program and sexual violence in ICE detention.
At the South Louisiana Ice Processing Center in Basile, detainees say they were forced into hard labor – and sexually assaulted and stalked
Three current and former detainees who spoke to the Guardian said that, between 2023 and 2025, they endured months of abuse from an assistant warden named Manuel Reyes and his associates. In their complaints to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the detainees also said that they faced retaliation for reporting the abuse to authorities, alleging that Reyes and other staff beat them and denied them medical treatment.
“I was treated worse than an animal,” said Mario Garcia-Valenzuela, one of the detainees. “We don’t deserve to be treated like this.”
Garcia-Valenzuela, a trans man detained at SLIPC, has alleged that, as part of the unsanctioned work program, Reyes forced him to move heavy cabinets and cinder blocks, and to clean using industrial-strength chemicals without gloves or protective gear. When Garcia-Valenzuela complained of injuries from the work program, he said, Reyes and his associates forcefully stripped him naked and mocked him.
Kenia Campos-Flores, who is trans and non-binary, told the Guardian that they suffered from persistent migraines and chest pain after exposure to cleaning chemicals they were made to use during unofficial, overnight work shifts. Campos-Flores also alleged in a complaint they were persistently sexually harassed by Reyes, who entered their dorm and stole possessions including their boxers.
Another trans detainee, Monica Renteria-Gonzalez, complained that a stripper chemical he was told to use to clean the facility floors seeped through his fabric shoes and burned the skin of his feet. On more than one occasion, while Renteria-Gonzalez was bent over cleaning, he said, Reyes came up from behind and inappropriately touched him. The assistant warden also told Renteria-Gonzalez he was watching the detainee through security cameras, including while he was showering.
A fourth detainee, identified by the pseudonym Jane Doe, is a cisgender, queer woman who said that Reyes forced her to perform oral sex on him on a “near daily basis” between February and May 2024, threatening to kill her if she refused, according to her complaint. [...]
“This was a sadistic late-night work program,” said Sarah Decker, a senior staff attorney with RFK Human Rights. “It was designed to target vulnerable trans men or masculine-presenting LGBTQ people, who [Reyes] coerced into participating.” [...]
Garcia-Valenzuela had fled to the US in 2014 from Mexico, where he was tortured by members of a drug cartel. “I have no choice, that’s why I’m fighting,” he said. “Because I know that as soon as they deport me, I’m going to be handed over to the cartels and I’m going to be tortured and killed – ripped into pieces.”
But in SLIPC he faced a new kind of horror. He alleged that on more than one occasion he was told to move heavy metal filing cabinets back and forth across a room. When he struggled to lift the furniture, Reyes would taunt him, he said, saying: “If you think you are a man, I’m going to treat you like a man.”
And no one in the community seems to be interested in bringing it the fuck up. Even a post which starts off by talking about forced detransitioning under ICE! You'd think this would be the perfect example of this kind of violence in action, but for some reason people don't seem to think these people make good enough victims for the cause. Why is that?
At a time where reproductive rights are also being drained away, where there is very clear targeting of people's ability to control if they are pregnant, is it really so much to ask that we don't start talking about trans men's ability to "financially and socially defend themselves" as if that means jack shit to the brown undocumented trans men being used as slaves and sexually assaulted by federal employees specifically because they are trans men.
"Focus their energies on protecting the most vulnerable" the majority of people I see who talk about reproductive justice forget trans men. The majority of people I see talk about 99% of social issues forget trans men, much less nonbinary people in general. When exactly are we allowed to focus our energies a population that has a 51% lifetime rate of sexual assault across races, and which goes up to 71% for Native trans men? A population that, no matter what study you look at, is paid less than cis women (also see here)?
"Relatively privileged"? Are you fucking kidding me? Do you have any idea how insanely hurtful and straight up misinformative that is to say, in these circumstances?
The callousness this shows towards trans men is just unconscionable, and is highly suggestive of a lack of knowledge about the violence trans men face as well as a lack of openness to questioning ingrained ideas about transmasculine people. I don't mean this as an attack but this is a very clear example of how people internalize transmasculine erasure and repeat it uncritically as fact. We cannot tolerate this rhetoric. I'd like to once again highlight this HRW report, specifically the section “"Butches Get Punched”: Violence Against Masculine-Presenting LBQ+ People” in “This Is Why We Become Activists”:
"Unless they present hyperfeminine, butches don’t have access to the job market. You will not be considered if you don’t wear nice women’s clothes. If you set up catering, you will get told, “I am disgusted; a woman who thinks she’s a man is cooking for me.” So butch lesbians normally have an assistant, or their femme partner if they have one, who is more feminine-looking to run the front so customers don’t know a masculine-presenting person is cooking behind the curtains. Many of us become sex workers [due to lack of job opportunities].… But then when police raid brothels and homes, the masculine lesbians get treated “like men.” This means more forceful handcuffing, kneeling, and stripping their shirts off."
– Rosa, lesbian and sex worker rights defender El Salvador
[...] While gender expression is thus less explicitly criminalized than sexual orientation—the same project reports 66 countries that criminalize same-sex relations between consenting adults —LBQ+ people interviewed for this report repeatedly named gendered discrimination against masculine gender expressions[238] in particular as the catalyst for a lifetime of economic marginalization, discrimination and harassment at work, psychological abuse, and physical and sexual violence.
Their accounts point to the need for deeper research and analysis of how masculine gender expression by LBQ+ people increases their risk of exposure to various human rights violations and abuses. Some reports on violence against LBQ+ people (explored below) have treated gender expression as a signifier of sexual orientation or gender identity, limiting knowledge production on how presentations of masculinity are themselves policed and violated.
This kind of attitude gets trans men is exactly what is described by this report as "limiting knowledge production on how presentations of masculinity are themselves policed and violated." It's just not right and its not remotely accurate. It can and does get trans men detransitioned and killed, and then those victims ignored and forgotten by the very people who claim to be acting purely out of a desire to focus on the most affected. The insistence that trans men don't need specific, focused attention and concern is exactly what creates the circumstances for their vulnerability!
If anyone wants to know more I'd recommend starting here and here.
I feel like Tumblr should really appreciate Iron Lung even if not Markiplier fans whatsoever. It's got all the good stuff. A man being thrown around, going crazy, facing cosmic horrors all while being covered in blood. What's not to love
*Me in the first half of the movie*: "Huh I was really expecting more blood in this considering the film broke a record with the amount of fake blood used"
*Me in the second half of the movie*: "Oh...Never mind!"
So as an Antarctic expert I need to add to this that we had not in fact been to Antarctica when it was named. The ancient Greeks decided that because there was an Arctic at the top of the world, with bears, there had to be an opposite at the other end, without bears. Which is kind of ridiculous except that the fuckers were dead on
I always struggled to capture people's likeness but I hope it looks at least a little bit like markiplier lololol
I loved Iron Lung as a game a lot, so I'm super excited for the movie to come out, and no better person to spearhead this project. Congrats on the release, Mark!!
