I had my own fairy godmother this weekend at comic con. So magical.
I slowed the actual transformation down 200% so you can see just how brilliant it is… From the first sign of the ballgown to completely changed takes less than 3 seconds. That is some epic-level crafting.
@justhere4coffee thank you! Wanted it to be as quick a transformation as possible!
My petty ass when someone skinny buys something XXXL from a thrift store to ~transform~ it into a cute tailored cocktail dress: how about you leave the XXXL section alone so poor fat women out there can retain some sense of variety out of the 7 things that actually fit them in the god damn goodwill
Since joining Tumblr, I’ve met a lot of young queer people. Look, I’m a bisexual man in a gay relationship, and I’m approaching 30. I was still a kid when Matthew Shepard’s story was being covered on the news. I remember thinking, “I better keep my mouth shut about these feelings I’m having.”
And then I met Dominic when I was 12, and people could see how in love we were. And we got the shit beat out of us. The year I met him, some kids in the grade above me held me down against the bleachers in our gym and stomped on my hand until my fingers broke. Instead of sending me to the nurse, the teacher sent me to the assistant principal to explain the situation. She asked why the kids had beat me up. I said, “They were calling me gay.”
Her response was, “Well, are you?”
My, “I don’t know,” earned a call to my parents, and I was outed. Efforts were made to keep me from seeing Dom. Throughout high school, Dom’s stepmother intensified these efforts. He slept in the basement of the house. Although he was an incredibly talented student, he was prohibited from participating in any extracurriculars. He suffered a lot of physical abuse during those years.
The day he turned 18, he packed up everything he had and walked to my house, and we’ve lived together ever since. Things are better, but they’re not perfect. I’ve had trucks pull up next to me at stoplights and, seeing the pride sticker on my car, through old drinks and garbage into my window. I no longer speak to my dad’s side of the family. I haven’t been to see them for Christmas or Thanksgiving in years. One of my uncles had cornered me at Thanksgiving when I was 17 and said, “I’m not going to judge you, but I’d be happy to break your neck so God can do the judging a little sooner.”
I joined a support group for trans and intersex people. When I joined, 40 people attended regularly. Within the year, the group was half the size it had been. Some couldn’t make it anymore, because they were staying at the shelter, where their stay hinged on them agreeing to instead to attend homophobic sermons. Some were put in correctional therapy. Five of them died. Three of those, I didn’t know, but I knew Alex, the 19 year old who was fag-dragged in Kentucky and died a day later in the hospital, and I knew Stephanie, who went home to Alabama to care for her mom in hospice and was beaten to death with a baseball bat by her mom’s boyfriend.
Tumblr is not reality. The dynamic here does not reflect the dynamic out there. Here’s the part where I finally make a point, and it might be extremely unpopular – but guys, value your allies.Value each other. We are met with enough hate in our daily lives to enter an online safe-space and meet more hate from our own, over petty things. Don’t go after one another over every little thing you find problematic.
Learn to see nuance. Maybe the word “queer” bothers you, and you see a gay man using it as an umbrella term. Maybe someone called a trans man a trans woman because they’re confused about terminology, but the post where they did it was voicing support for the trans community. Maybe someone is just asking a question, wanting to learn more. Stop. Attacking. These. People.
Allies are being driven away. Members of our own community are being ostracized. Others are feeling nervous and estranged, and it’s largely because of places like Tumblr, where the social justice movement is quickly becoming violent and radical. I am begging you, stop nitpicking “problematic” things and start directing your efforts to create real change. When it comes to comes to your allies, forget the “social justice warrior” mentality and put down your torch. Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving. And I’m certainly not saying that your anger doesn’t have a good place – when you are met with bigots on the street, congress members who want to pass hateful laws, violent protesters, abusive parents, prejudiced teachers, that is when you need to be a warrior. That’s when it counts. In the real world. When you have the opportunity to protect people from real harm. Attacking your would-be allies via anonymous asks is just going to lose us ground in the long run. And we don’t have time for that, not when trans women of color are being murdered every day, not when states are still fighting against marriage equality, not when there are politicians in office who believe that trans people are possessed by demons, not when we’ve just lost 50 brothers and sisters to one gunman, not when the media won’t even admit that the attack was homophobic.
Please step back. Look at the big picture. Look at where we are, globally. Don’t just log on to your safe space and attack your allies over small missteps. That’s like washing the dishes in a house that’s on fire, kids. Let’s fight on the battlefield, and when we come home to each other, let’s just focus on bandaging up our wounds so we can go out and win the war.
Signal boost to this unbelievably important message.
congratulations, you have been forcibly introduced to the African Bullfrog, also
known in pet-owner circles as the Pixie Frog.
look at his little hands!
while they are indeed adorable, the nickname actually derives from the scientific name of the species (pyxicephalus adspersus), and not any positive qualities they possess.
hoo boy they don’t have many of those, lemme tell you
found throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa, the Pixie Frog lives in wet areas where they eat pretty much anything they can fit into those ginormous mouths. (this includes fish, other frogs, bugs, snakes, lizards, other frogs, rodents, unattentive birds, other frogs, and probably you too if you hold still long enough)
this is a creature born with neither fear nor conscience
and it’s no idle threat either, because Pixie Frogs can grow to 10 inches long, which is well within ‘unreasonably huge’ for an amphibian. also, unlike most frogs, Pixie Frogs have fucking teeth
ALL THE BETTER TO EAT YOU WITH, MY DEARRRRR
in spite of all of this, Pixie Frogs remain popular pet animals, possibly because they will allow you to pick them up and carry them around like a newborn.
and we can respect that.
she has four of them and they’re named after her grandchildren
just, you know, make sure you count your fingers after you hold one.
EXCUSE YOU BUT ALLOF THEIR CHARACTERISTICS ARE POSITIVE
also you forgot that they’re one of few frog species in which the male is larger than the female so in amplexus they look like this
haha frog stack
here’s a picture of Many of them because they get funnier the more of them there are
now I don’t want to be That Guy but that is not really how you hold a baby, one should not balance one’s young on outstretched hands like one is proffering a sacred pumpkin, which is why when you hand a baby to a friend who has never touched one before, they try to hold it this way (i.e., at arm’s length, like a yam, or an unexpected fish) then the baby cries. You should only hold a baby aloft like this if you are a celebrant of a ceremony where you present them to the massed group of wild animals over whom they will rule as a monarch.
To hold something like a baby, you must really hold it like a scared puppy, which is like This:
can I hold this frog like this…. I wish to…. I feel it would be appropriate…. I would carry it about the city slowly, making pronouncements. I wonder if the frog would like this. would the frog enjoy being held like a baby
They’re also terribly poor sports about video games.
you over there! you want to read gay books? YA gay books? good, here’s the must must MUST read books, AND MOST IMPORTANT! when you pick one up and read it TELL ME!
Also how can Arthur Conan Doyle write a character like Irene Adler 1891 and have her 1. Outsmart Sherlock Holmes and get away with it and 2. Be in no way a damsel or love interest to Sherlock.. But every modern retelling not only has her be a sexual /love interest character but she is posed as being very very smart… But never smart enough to just outwit him, get away with it and move on? Women can be smart, sure, but no one is allowed to be smarter than Sherlock.
It’s been over 120 years and Irene is, at her best, never as decently treated as the original.
Arthur Conan Doyle: Here’s a story about male insecurity where the police underestimate her for being a woman and feel the need to get her because she’s a woman and Sherlock is ultimately beaten by a woman and in a bit of character development accepts it and acknowledges her intellect.
Sherlock fans: Uh no way Sherlock is smart Sherlock is so so smart she must have used her feminine wiles or her sexy things or her love to undermine him but he gets her in the end i feel a strange catharsis at changing this ending but I’m sure Doyle always meant to be this way, it just feels right.
Half of the reason that Adler was able to out-wit Holmes was because Holmes was too narrow-minded. Holmes is smart and has knowledge of many subjects, but he also strongly relies on social order and norms to solve crimes. He’s even says in A Scandal in Bohemia that:
“When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to thing which she values most. It is a
perfectly overpowering impulse, and I have more than once taken advantage of it
… A married woman grabs at her baby; an unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box.”
Holmes uses this social norm and order to stage an attack and find out where Adler hid the photo in her house. He drops his guard and is so proud of himself because he knew that this would work, he knew that if he created disorder, “natural” order would attempt to counteract that disorder.
Adler defies those social orders and norms: she is an untitled American woman who earned her own money through a career as an opera star, instead of relying on a husband or family to have financial security; she outwitted Holmes because she cross-dressed and indicated that she frequently did so, allowing her to have a lot more freedom roaming around London on her own terms, and her stage career aided that so that she could act like a man easily; and she didn’t care one bit about her reputation or being a “pure” woman, had several boyfriends, and was known for being an “adventuress”. More importantly, she had the ability to defy those social norms while simultaneously being able to present herself as the ideal respectable and under-estimable Victorian-era woman.
Adler literally defeats Holmes by dressing in drag then happily goes off with her new husband whom she loves very much. And Holmes respects that and is thoroughly impressed. Not only does he respect that, he realizes that he was on the wrong side of things, that he shouldn’t have agreed to take on the case for the King of Bohemia. This is the exchange that follows after Holmes, Watson and the King read Adler’s letter.
“Would she not have made an admirable queen?
Is it not a pity that she was not on my level?”
“From what I have seen of the
lady she seems indeed to be on a very different level to your Majesty,” said
Holmes coldly
Holmes takes Adler’s side and realizes that the photograph is her protection from the King, not something she intended to use as a weapon against him. Adler never exploited the King to get what she wanted, only kept it as a safeguard of her own happiness. She made sure she had a way of ensuring that she alone guided her future.
Irene Adler is “the woman” to Sherlock Holmes, not because she was sexy or he was in love with her. She was a reminder that real life doesn’t always follow what social norms and order are to be expected, that people shouldn’t be taken on face value or respected just because of their title or apparent respectability and ability to follow social order and norms, and that there are two sides to every story.
Take a lesson from Sherlock Holmes, people. Doyle knew what he was doing. If we’re going to keep making him roll over in his grave from creating Sherlock Holmes media, please, at least respect him and Irene Adler.
My girlfriend Marna has been a queer activist since the late 80s. She’s told me about the incredible deliberation and debates LGBTQ+ activists had, in the late 90s and early 00s as the community began to see past the AIDS crisis and immediate goals of “surviving a plague” and “burying our dead.” There were a lot of things we wanted to achieve, but we had to decide how to allocate our scarce reserves of money, labour, publicity, and public goodwiil. Those were the discussions that decided the next big goals we’d pursue were same-sex marriage equality and legal recognition of medical gender transition.
From hearing her tell it, it seems like it was actually a wrenching decision, because it absolutely left a lot of people in the dust. A lot of people, her included, had broad agendas based on sexual freedom and the rights of people to do whatever they wanted with their bodies and consenting partners—and they agreed to put their broader concerns aside and drill down, very specifically, onto the rights of cis gays and lesbians to marry, and the ability to legally change your sex and gender.
As a political tactic it was terrifically effective. In less than two decades, public opinion in many countries has totally reversed on gay marriage, and we’ve won some truly enormous legal landmarks. Gender transition has entered public consciousness and the first landmark battles allowing people to define their own gender have been won. Marriage equality means that husbands and wives are protected from being banned from their dying spouse’s bedside, being forcibly separated from their children, or not being recognized as an important part of their spouse’s life.
The LGBTQ+ community knew they were taking a gamble, focusing so exclusively on marriage equality, and trans activists knew that they wouldn’t be able to achieve anything else until they’d gotten basic medical transition recognized. By and large, prioritizing things this way paid off. But they knew going in that there would be costs—and we’re reaping them.
Activists of 20 years ago chose to sideline and diminish efforts to blur and abolish the gender binary. Efforts to promote alternative family structures, including polyamorous families and non-sexual bonds between non-related adults. Efforts to fight the Christian cultural message that sex is dirty, sinful, bad, and in need of containment. Efforts to promote sexual pleasure as a positive good.
Those efforts have been going on for the last 20 years, but they’re marginalized—activists who had to decide where their finite time, money, publicity, and social capital went literally sat in committee meetings and said, “Marriage equality is our top priority. Legal gender transition is our top priority. Everything else will have to wait.”
This happened especially because sex education, sex positivity, and youth outreach were incredibly dangerous areas. Our enemies have been saying for years that all LGBTQ+ people are pedophiles, perverts, seeking to corrupt and recruit children to our cause; anyone trying to teach children basic facts about how to avoid disease, what’s happening to their own bodies, or what possibilities they have for identity and orientation, risks having their name, career, and life ruined. As a sex educator in the 90s, Marna had to tell teenagers, “I can’t answer your questions about safe sex now. Come back when you turn 18.”
So kids who grew up being told that girls and boys are different and ought to lead different lives, and sex is dangerous and sinful and gross, and you definitely shouldn’t want sex UNTIL you get married to your One True Love, only had that message tweaked a little bit. Now you can cross the floor from the Girl Side to the Boy Side or vice-versa. Now your One True Love doesn’t have to be a different gender from you. But those kids could survive with the rest of their worldview relatively intact. And I think that’s what we’re seeing in fandom, with an emphasis on “pure” OTP ships, on only including LGBT+ identities that use crisp, clear gender binaries and result in nuclear family life. The rest of those cultural messages about sex and love remain: men’s and women’s worlds are and should be different, “impure” sex degrades and defiles you, sexual urges that do not contribute to your One True Love and family life should be repressed, shamed, or destroyed, and sexual thoughts are every bit as bad as acting on them.
This isn’t because kids today are bad or stupid. It’s because as a community, we had to decide where our effort was going, and now we need to pay down the debt we’ve racked up over years of prioritizing marriage equality and legal trans recognition over sex positivity, sex education, and deconstructing gender.
TERFs, SWERFs, exclusionists, and transmedicalists have stolen a march over liberal queers because they’re doing the work to educate youth. While liberal queers have been staging protests and lobbying politicians, half a dozen of my undergraduate professors were radical feminists. Communities of exclusionists and anti-sex activists have honed their expertise at engaging teenagers with their ideas and theories. They’re the ones writing the FAQs, answering the asks, and doing the groundwork of saying, “Here is a basic framework of sexual ethics for you to follow.”
If we want to win back the culture wars, we have to step up our own efforts. Go back to the sex educators and gender activists whose good work has been ignored or underfunded for all this time and support them. Let major LGBTQ+ activist organizations know that their work so far is very nice, but it’s time to renew our focus on youth outreach and mentoring young activists. Brainstorm a way to help angry, isolated, disenfranchised young people form communities based around positive action and a sense of belonging. Get into mentorship or education yourself. Help us pivot as a community, to reach out to the kids who have obviously been underserved.
This is a delightful post and I’m delighted you linked it over on Dreamwidth, which is where I saw it. I’m sitting here and chewing it over and integrating it into my personal experience of being, y’know, a twenty-eight-year old who reaped many of both the victories–Coffee wouldn’t be right here, living with me, without DOMA going down; wouldn’t have health insurance without Obergefell; wouldn’t feel safe if anything happened to me without legal recognition of our relationship–and also someone who came from a really different microculture.
God, I feel like the “HI I AM BRINGING THE ACE PERSPECTIVE TO BROADER HISTORY” person these days, but here’s a thing that strikes me: my communities, growing up, were also out there having sidestepped the marriage discussion and instead having chosen to focus on youth outreach, education, and engagement. I mean, for a decade the central ace-spec community out there was AVEN, which literally chose to call itself the Asexual Visibility and Education Network.
And the thing is, the same community was also quietly but heavily influenced by a lot of those ideas about blurred gender binaries and new family structures. There have always been quiet but powerful sex-positive currents in ace communities, to the point that in 2011 there were quite a lot of us going “Hang on, hang on, why the hell are we the standard-bearers of how great sex is?” in frustration. Ace communities are such a haven for nonbinary folks that in 2011 fully 40% of the surveyed community for one widely published study found that people ticked their gender identity as something other than “male” or “female.” (This is counting folks who put down identifications along the lines of “male-ish” or “female-ish”, which was a viable option.) And anyone who has looked at an ace community for five minutes or listened to ace folks talk about fantasies of family has seen how much focus these communities place on alternative family styles.
A lot of that sort of burst back all over mainstream queer communities again circa 2010-2012ish, as AVEN shattered and ace communities sprang up without necessarily referencing it. But those discussions and those currents and those feelings go right back to the roots of what AVEN was, and more to the point they go back to the roots of those older activism strains that were deliberately unfed by many “mainstream” queer activists: for example, asexual folks probably didn’t come up with romantic orientation wholesale–I ran into it described as “affectional” orientation often enough in ~2005ish that I’m pretty sure it was picked up from bisexual communities and dialogues. But it was indisputably asexual culture that burst out around 2011 and repopularized the concept within younger queer communities, to the point that I’ve run into a lot of allo folks asking if it’s appropriation to pick up the concept and borrow it for themselves.
Or–I’d ask @coffee-mage-sans-caffeine for more input than me on early nonbinary/genderqueer communities, because they know more about those spaces than me by a country mile, or maybe @xenoqueer has thoughts. But for a while there, when I met any given person who didn’t identify as male or female I could often work out whether they were coming from an ace-influenced or a non-ace-influenced background just by seeing if they used the word “nonbinary” or “genderqueer.” I’m pretty sure I wrote something about it at the time, but I haven’t got the time to go digging right now.
So I’m sitting here tilting my head and wondering: because while mainstream LGBTQ activists, for lack of a better turn, might have given this fight up wholesale while putting their muscle and their blood and sweat and tears into marriage equality, I don’t think TERFs et al. were the only pockets of queer community who were going out and focusing very specifically on youth engagement. I actually think that ace communities–and maybe the non-ace nonbinary communities of trans folks–might have been picking up and incubating many of these ideals and engaging in outreach all on their own.
It’s an interesting thought, thinking about AVEN as the vanguard of all of these older, tactically silenced priorities for queer liberation. And it makes a certain amount of sense in the context of the inclusionist/exclusionist wars c. 2003-2004 within ace communities outside of AVEN, too.
NineofShades 