I scream

she/her Zoomin'

[zemathememequeen]

After two and a half years of writing, I have finally finished my very first webnovel, entitled "Be a girl", which you can now read in its entirety here.

Be a girl is a story about a teenager who so desperately wishes she could be a girl, but believes it to be impossible. It's a story about denying what your heart most wants. It's a story about coming to terms with the fact that you will never get the fairy tale ending you always wanted. It's a story about becoming the person you were always meant to be in a world that doesn't want you to. That even if you don't believe it, you can be a girl.

Be a girl is very personal to me. It's based heavily on my own experiences growing up as a trans girl. Back then, I never believed I could be a girl, even though I wanted it so desperately. Be a girl is a letter to my teenage self. It embraces her with an understanding of what she's going through, and whispers that it will all be ok. It won't be perfect, but you can be a girl. I promise.

Be a girl

Unfortunately for Ben, his wish for an uneventful seventeenth birthday goes unanswered. As expected, the bullies who tormented him through m

[balaclava-trismegistus]

the universal transgender experience of in-group signifier ❤️

[balaclava-trismegistus]

being transgender is about [CONSUMER IDENTITY]

[thyrell]

look at todays featured wikipedia article

[thyrell]

[thyrell]

[adastrabbit]

i HAAAAATE self-sacrifice as a redemptive action. you didnt redeem shit!!! you just died!!!

[contemptible-scoundrel]

I was mugged by snow white and the seven dwarves the other day. six dwarves now, I suppose. kneed dipshit or dopey or whatever he was called in the eye socket so hard he died before his limp body hit the ground. they all scattered after that. I'll never forget how they wailed his name

[curioscurio]

but you did forget the actual name yelled...

[caffedorzo]

so exhausted by how fundamentally anti-human the capitalist world has become. like ageing, getting fat, being slightly inefficient, and making mediocre art are all extremely normal and extremely human activities, why is every corporation trying to convince us to spend all our money fighting that

[unamccormack]

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

—Kurt Vonnegut

[cutter-kirby]

when the characters love each other and it's not romantic and it's never expected to be anything "more" than what they are to each other now. when they mean so much to each other and it's entirely aromantic

[creatingblackcharacters]

I can't remember where I read it last week, but the person discussed how when we think of chattel slavery in the US, we tend to think of massive plantations of cotton or tobacco, with one very rich white master or mistress with lots of land and lots of enslaved people. But we very rarely think of the many families that had just one or two slaves, in smaller homes.

Because it's not like you had to pay them, so once your family owned someone, they owned them and their descendants indefinitely. Could you pay and eventually free em- sure! You could also send them anywhere you want for any labor you want, could have an enslaved woman bred for more children, or maybe save up and buy new slaves and sell the old. Like cattle (thus, chattel slavery).

So it's interesting that many people go "oh well it's not like my family owned slaves!" Because like, one, how do you know that? Have you ever actually asked your grandmas about their grandmas? How many of your family members grew up with mammies? Have you ever asked? I wonder how many people have actually done the digging for the truth (or was it easier to just benefit). Because I've talked to my grandma, who picked cotton in the sea islands. She had to have been doing that for someone in the 1930s and 40s!

And two, it's easy to think that because your family (or someone else's) didn't own sprawling stolen land and generational blood money like a plantation owner, that it wasn't as important. But... It was. That was still someone's entire life. That was a person, whose labor benefitted and saved a family money that could be used in other ventures. How often do we think of them?

[dykepuffs]

The UK version of this is "We didn't own slaves! There were no slaves in Great Britain and anyone setting foot on our sainted shores was immediately freed! We never had a slave society!!!!" BUT they forget that it was ludicrously common for middle class families to own shares in slaves. You'd notionally "own" a couple of slaves (or, you'd own some fraction of a slave) that were working on a plantation somewhere else in the world, and in return for that you'd get a dividend from the company that owned the whole plantation.

It was a normal kind of investment, the same kind of thing as putting your money in the Premium Bonds or in a savings account. But it was harder to "see" so people tend to forget it.

[randomramblesofaraven]

#also in the uk people definitely owned slaves#like literally on english soil#and it wasnt a hush hush under the table thing#there were ads with reward money for escaped slaves in newspapers in the uk#slavery was illegal in the uk the way police brutality is illegal in the us#aka technically but no one enforced those laws <- prev tags (@nerdvanauniverse)

[villainessbian]

When the UK abolished slavery, they did it by first banning the slave trade but not slavery in 1807. The slave owners were important to the economy, you see.

26 years later, in 1833, they banned slavery by buying and freeing all remaining slaves, because the owners were entitled to compensation, you see.

And they forced the "freed" "former" slaves to pay for part of it by forcing the "freed" "former" slaves to work for their "former" masters for 4 more years, 45 hours a week.

(I haven't read that they were treated more harshly than before at this time, but when you expect to get free labour from someone for several decades, you invest in them keeping the ability to produce labour for you - when there's a deadline, you work them to the bone and who cares if they die. I'm assuming the worst of the worst happened then.)

The rest of the cost was paid for by taxes. Comparing finances and inflation across three centuries is a bit imprecise, but remember that this compensation to slavers was so high, that loan was only finally paid for in 2015.

"UK taxpayer money was funnelled into slavery until 2015" is one way of looking at it. Brits have no right to pretend it didn't happen.

[kosmogrl]

goodbye april let’s never go through something like this again

[mousidy]

I really would like to not be treated like my body makes me dangerous

[noze2222]

This is a huge issue for transfems even amongst so-called "progressive" people. Saw someone claim that a trans woman "weaponized their AGAB strength" the other day and if that doesn't speak volumes about how we're perceived by the queer community at large I don't know what does

[i-am-a-fish]

The boss says we need to start hanging out at double efficiency. we need to chill twice as much

[spankerella]

I think we all should.

[alivehouse]

"i just dont think the scientology speedrun trend is funny because if people did that with any other religious institution-" ok guys lets all go to the 'scientology controversies' page on wikipedia and scroll a bit before continuing this thought. lets do this right now

[allegedly-human]

This argument doesn't work because we should do Vatican speedruns

[lonelydesolate]

there is no intersection of oppression that trans men face but also they face an intersection of transphobia and misogyny 👍

[chiropteracupola]

It's Another Beautiful Day of Not Being On Mount Everest. just how Every day of my life will be Another Beautiful Day of Not Being On Mount Everest, on account of how I am Never Ever Going There.

[teaboot]

Not to be rhe ten millionth person to say “USAmerican President Donald Trump Is An Incoherent Public Speaker Whose Train Of Thought Can Be Best Described As Scat Jazz” but I just remembered that when he talks at international events it is several dozen people’s job to translate what he’s saying and what he intends to say to world leaders in real time

And I desperately wish to hear how they do it

[teaboot]

If anyone reading this isn’t fluent enough in English to understand the sentences that man says, please know that he has essentially mixed a number of adjectives and topics together in a hat and is pulling them out at random like a horrible children’s game

[teaboot]

Like that waxy jaundiced bitch will straight up be like “J'étais sur internet l'autre jour – internet, la plus grande invention américaine. Et la Chine a “internet aussi. Pas un bon internet, pas comme le mien, j'ai un internet formidable. Les gens me disent : « Donald, ton internet est génial ! » On adore l'internet de Donald. Mais la Chine… Chine, Chine, Chine… Vous savez qu'ils mangent des oiseaux ? C'est terrible. J'adore les oiseaux. La Chine mange des oiseaux. Pas comme nous. Pas comme mes oiseaux. Mais vous savez, c'est comme ça, et c'est terrible. Mais voilà ce que je vais faire : je vais sauver les oiseaux. Je vais sauver internet et sauver les oiseaux. Tous ces magnifiques oiseaux. Pour l'Amérique. Et la Chine va nous détester pour ça. Ils vont nous détester parce qu'on est les meilleurs sur oiseaux”. And people will lose their minds

[angryraptor13]

International translators have had this problem for A While - if they *don't* clean up what he says to sound coherent, they look like they're doing a bad job.

Why is difficult to translate Donald Trump? Trumpslation explained.

Explore Trump translation challenges, tips for interpreters, and 2025 strategies for accurate political translation and Trumpslation success

[teaboot]

oh my god

[freckles-a-constellation]

There was a scandal in Poland because one translator decided to translate him accurately, tone, vocabulary level and word salad tangents and all. Polish conservatives who don't speak English and previously only heard smoothed out translations that sounded coherent and used big words were up in arms about how the translator was "inserting her political agenda", "mocking him", "exaggerating", "purposefully trying to make him look bad" and "incredibly unprofessional". I listened to the translation in question. It was literally just accurate.

[kimbureh]

5. Sensitive and Controversial Language Trump’s speeches occasionally contain misogynistic, sexist, or inflammatory language. Japanese interpreter Tsuruta, for example, faced challenges when translating sexualized remarks, ultimately opting for standard terminology to maintain professionalism. Similarly, Chinese translator Kumiko Torikai found certain lewd expressions ethically challenging, ultimately leading to her retirement. Navigating these situations requires skillful balancing of accuracy, professionalism, and cultural sensitivity, ensuring that the translation is appropriate without distorting the original intent.

I don't know why the authors of PoliLingua act as if Trump's verbal misogyny and racism wasn't very much part of his "original intent".

it only now dawns on me that millions of people on this planet think Trump is way smarter than he is because translators have neglected to relate his violent speech accurately out of misunderstood politeness. Make the ape sound like a ape

[brucebocchi]