titled
and submitted.
November 2011
I need to title this poem so I can send it out but I hate every title I come up with.
October 2011
“The average life span of a transgendered person is twenty-three years. The statistic is shocking, until it begins to make sense. Gender non-conformists face routine exclusion and violence. Transgendered people are disproportionately poor, homeless, and incarcerated. Many of the systems and facilities intended to help low-income people are sex-segregated and thereby alienate those who don’t comply with state-imposed categories. A trans woman may not be able to secure a bed in a homeless shelter, for example. Spade writes that just as the feminist movement tended to “focus on gender-universalized white women’s experience as ‘women’s experience,’” the lesbian- and gay-rights movement has focused primarily on a white, middle-class politic, centered on marriage and mainstream social mores.”
—
Guernica / Trans-Formative Change
Dean Spade is the first openly trans law professor. Meaghan Winter interviews him for Granta.
FUCKING READ THIS SHIT. NEXT TIME ANYONE THINKS IT’S OKAY TO RAG ON TRANS* PEOPLE (BECAUSE LOLOL THEIR EXISTENCE IS JUST SO FUNNY, ISN’T IT FUNNY THAT SOME PEOPLE AREN’T EXACTLY LIKE ME), I AM GOING TO PRINT THIS QUOTE OUT AND STAPLE IT TO THE ASSHOLE’S FOREHEAD. Fucking read this shit and think hard, think as hard as you can, about how tragic this is. Your tittering and joking and mocking and bullying — which is, painfully obviously, motivated by an indoctrinated discomfort that you are too ignorant or complacent to question the morality of — is what facilitates violence against the trans* community. No, you don’t have to personally pull the trigger, or raise your fist, or deny care and shelter.
All you have to do is systematically dehumanize. All you have to do is deny the weight of your words and the pedestal of your privilege, ignore the suffering that you can conveniently shrug off after an insensitive SNL skit or forum post because what does it matter to me if these people are dying?
(via gadgetry)
If you are not foaming-at-the-mouth angry right now, read that first sentence again (unless you’d like to protect your blood pressure, in which case have a soothing non-invasive hug from me right now).
(via mumblingsage)
Who does he think he is?: how to decode a person with an anxiety disorder →
johnnysaisquoi.tumblr.com
things we are trying to do all the time:
- be safe
things we can’t help but do all the time:
- second-guess ourselves
- behave impulsively and reactively
- take everything personally
- worry
- worry
- worry
- have difficulty accepting compliments
- have difficulty…
Feminists Against Cissexist Feminists →
facebook.com
I made a page with the aim to challenge trans* hate within the feminist community. Please like and spread the word!
boost
I'M A LITTLE MAN AND I'M ALSO EVIL ALSO INTO CATS
also into caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaats
Have No Fear! Beth is here!: djshambala: chickacherrycola: shangy is trying to get me to move to... →
bethosaurus.tumblr.com
shangy is trying to get me to move to tallahassee and be his roommate so that he can afford a place with a yard
shangy 1:26 pm
also i apologize in advance i am just using you to get my chickens
jazzie 1:27 pm
lmao i appreciate your…
every time I turn around I find more statementsers on Tumblr, and I approve.
A Message to Women from a Man: You're Not "Crazy" →
huffingtonpost.com
Because women bare the brunt of our neurosis. It is much easier for us to place our emotional burdens on the shoulders of our wives, our female friends, our girlfriends, our female employees, our female colleagues, than for us to impose them on the shoulders of men.
It’s a whole lot easier to emotionally manipulate someone who has been conditioned by our society to accept it. We continue to burden women because they don’t refuse our burdens as easily. It’s the ultimate cowardice.
My best friend sent me this article, and it is exceptional. It even got me a little emotional with it’s truth-bombs.
We’ve talked about gaslighting here before. This is a good read.
-Joe
5-Year-Old Black Girl Disappears and No One Cares →
thestir.cafemom.com
ssia:
Not even on fucking tumblr.
160 reblogs?
how can this only have that many
fucking reblog this shit please
“
If we teach women that there are only certain ways they may acceptably behave, we should not be surprised when they behave in those ways.
And we should not be surprised when they behave these ways during attempted or completed rapes.
Women who are taught not to speak up too loudly or too forcefully or too adamantly or too demandingly are not going to shout “NO” at the top of their goddamn lungs just because some guy is getting uncomfortably close.
Women who are taught not to keep arguing are not going to keep saying “NO.”
Women who are taught that their needs and desires are not to be trusted, are fickle and wrong and are not to be interpreted by the woman herself, are not going to know how to argue with “but you liked kissing, I just thought…”
Women who are taught that physical confrontations make them look crazy will not start hitting, kicking, and screaming until it’s too late, if they do at all.
Women who are taught that a display of their emotional state will have them labeled hysterical and crazy (which is how their perception of events will be discounted) will not be willing to run from a room disheveled and screaming and crying.
Women who are taught that certain established boundaries are frowned upon as too rigid and unnecessary are going to find themselves in situations that move further faster before they realize that their first impression was right, and they are in a dangerous room with a dangerous person.
Women who are taught that refusing to flirt back results in an immediately hostile environment will continue to unwillingly and unhappily flirt with somebody who is invading their space and giving them creep alerts.
People wonder why women don’t “fight back,” but they don’t wonder about it when women back down in arguments, are interrupted, purposefully lower and modulate their voices to express less emotion, make obvious signals that they are uninterested in conversation or being in closer physical proximity and are ignored. They don’t wonder about all those daily social interactions in which women are quieter, ignored, or invisible, because those social interactions seem normal. They seem normal to women, and they seem normal to men, because we were all raised in the same cultural pond, drinking the same Kool-Aid.
And then, all of a sudden, when women are raped, all these natural and invisible social interactions become evidence that the woman wasn’t truly raped. Because she didn’t fight back, or yell loudly, or run, or kick, or punch. She let him into her room when it was obvious what he wanted. She flirted with him, she kissed him. She stopped saying no, after a while.
” —Harriet J on Another post about rape (via archenemies)
Oh my god, this. All of this.
(via one-bite-at-a-time)
Tor.com » “A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel” by Yoon Ha Lee →
tor.com
The people of a certain red star no longer speak its name in any of their hundreds of languages, although they paint alien skies with its whorled light and scorch its spectral lines into the sides of their vessels.
Their most common cult, although by no means a universal one, is that of many-cornered Mrithaya, Mother of the Conflagration. Mrithaya is commonly conceived of as the god of catastrophe and disease, impartial in the injuries she deals out. Any gifts she bestows are incidental, and usually come with sharp edges. The stardrive was invented by one of her worshipers.
always reblog Yoon Ha Lee goodness, yes.
“When somebody says, “I don’t think women should be raped for wearing short skirts, but what do they expect when they do go out like that?” what you are actually saying is that if a woman in a short skirt is raped, you will be less likely to hold her rapist culpable. Which makes a woman in a short skirt really appealing to a rapist. That’s something that you did. That’s not something the woman in the short skirt did, or something the rapist did. You made that woman a more comfortable target by making it clear that if she got raped, you would be less upset about it, less willing to see the rapist go to jail, less willing to support the woman. A woman is not increasing her risk of being raped by wearing a short skirt. You are increasing her risk of being raped by saying that women who get raped in short skirts should have expected that. Rapists hear you say that. By only raping the women that bystanders agree should be raped, a rapist reduces his chance of being caught and, if caught, punished. And that is why he will pick those women, over and over again, not because there is something more appealingly rapeable about them — they have what any woman has, as far as rape goes — but because he will be less likely to be held culpable for his actions.”
—(via mollay)
Esoterica: history, get you some: black women organize against sexual assault →
karnythia.tumblr.com
The kidnapping and rape of Recy Taylor was not unusual in the segregated South. The sexual exploitation of black women by white men had its roots in slavery, but continued, often unpunished, through the better part of the twentieth century. As Reconstruction collapsed and Jim…
this ain't livin': Mental Health Parity Laws: Fighting Stigma? →
meloukhia.net
The divide in coverage between what I’ll call, for our purposes, mental and physical health2 illustrates a larger cultural divide in the way people think about illness and disability. Disability is often framed as something embodied; the very name implies this. A disability is something physical, not mental. The brain is something different. The mind/body divide is stark, when it comes to the way people talk about disablility; many people with serious mental illness do not consider themselves disabled because this thing is in their minds, not their bodies, and they don’t ‘count.’
A Black Woman Who Occupied Wall Street: Why She Won't Be Going Back →
dailykos.com
THIS is why i have trouble getting behind occupy wall street and other white-led movements. because despite how “progressive” people who lead them are, there is STILL rampant oppression within the movements. WOC are STILL silenced. and there is never anything done about it. if you like to think of white progressive as saints, it would seriously behoove you to read this article.
_________
A FEW CHOICE QUOTES FROM HER ACCOUNT:
“Women are being molested in the park and there is no real viable system in place to handle it without the need for police intervention. There are white supremacists groups running around there. There are people smoking drugs there even though it puts the entire action at risk…”
“There is a constant marginalization of women and I was even verbally and physically imposed on and threatened by a white man who was up in my face with his fingers pointing in my face because he wanted to dictate to people what he thought they should do. When I spoke up and said that he and two other white men are not supposed to dictate to everyone what should happen but that the decision should be made through consensus he got angry.”
“A black man I met there came over I was telling him what happened. Another white guy steps in between us and proceeds to explain to him what happened in order to protect the other white man.”
“White people are still acceptably in charge, arrogant and superior. In other words, you can have all of the experience in the world as an organizer, activist or facilitator but if you are not a white man then its a problem. If you are a white man…its acceptable and fine, even if the meeting isn’t fruitful and doesn’t result in anything.”
“I don’t know what the agenda of these white people are but their paternalistic attitudes, constant invalidation, smart remarks and repressive behavior toward myself and other black people is not productive nor is it liberating.”
“He said he doesn’t understand why black people are attacking him when he presents this to them and he has been attacked five times already that day. I told him that the fact that he doesn’t understand why he is being attacked, is all the more reason why he shouldn’t be in charge of an action like that. This is another example of the paternalistic attitudes that exists amongst these white people who think they are automatically in charge and not only that but are somehow in a position to articulate my oppression as a black woman for me.”
“I came away from this experience feeling unsupported, disrespected, maligned and even more oppressed.”
“This disgusting display of white superiority and male dominance exists throughout this OWS movement. The only bright spot in all of this was the newly formed Women Occupying Wall Street (WOW) group. These women were informed, supportive and concerned about the issues I and other women raised and also had been subjected to abusive behaviors themselves.”
Esoterica: Patricia Spottedcrow (WITH UPDATE!!!) →
karnythia.tumblr.com
UPDATE: She is getting another hearing for a modification of her sentence on October 6th!!!! READ MORE HERE
Last night I made a post about Patricia Spottedcrow and sending her letters to keep her spirit & mental health alive while she serves a 12 year prison sentence…
Thank you Karynthia.
And in case anyone else wants to write as well.
$15,000 Reward for Killer of Brooklyn Mom →
theroot.com
A $15,000 reward is being offered to help find the killer of Zurana Horton, who died shielding schoolchildren from the gunfire of a rooftop shooter in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the New York Daily News reports.
I never heard about this woman and mother in the news. They are calling her a hero mom and in many ways, they should. It’s just sad she probably hasn’t gotten much coverage or attention.
“
Another Proclamation - Sherman Alexie
When
Lincoln
Delivered
The
Emancipation,
Who
Knew
that, one year earlier, in 1862, he’d signed and approved the order for the largest public execution in the United States History? Who did they execute? “Mulatto, mixed-bloods, and Indians.”
Why did they execute them? “For uprising against the State and her citizens.” Where did they execute them? Mankato, Minnesota. How did they execute them? Well, Abraham Lincoln thought it was good.
And
Just
To
Hang
Thirty-eight
Sioux
simultaneously. Yes, in front of a large and cheering crowd, thirty-eight Indians dropped to their deaths. Yes, thirty-eight necks snapped. But before they died, thirty-eight Indians sang their death songs. Can you imagine the cacophony of thirty-eight different death songs? But wait, one Indian was pardoned at the last minute, so only thirty-seven Indians had to sing their death songs. But, O, O, O, O, can you imagine the cacophony of that one survivor’s mourning song? If he taught you the words, do you think you would sing along?
” —- Sherman Alexie, from War Dances (via highwaysunset)
i had to explain this to some of the other indians in my program when we visited the lincoln memorial. we all need education; natives aren’t automatically born with the knowledge of all the atrocities perpetrated against us.
(via tsigili)
cabulous rhymes with "fabulous": I was hoping →
cabell.tumblr.com
I wouldn’t have to do this again, but I am back in deep financial shit. My ex claims to have paid me everything he was supposed to this month, but it looks to me like he still owes me 400 bucks for the last couple of months. If I try to push issue, I’m risking a…
maevele is good people. please reblog and help if you can. <3
Black pregnant woman killed while protecting kids in Brownsville, BK →
theroot.com
and apparently, there is no coverage of this and no arrest. a gunman on the top of a building starts targeting children at school and a number of people are injured and one killed.
yet none of this is on the news?? like the link says, if this had happened in Manhattan, they woulda been coverage to no end. the racial segregation of the schools in NYC is very disturbing. and when you look at the amount of funding each borough received for education, it’s a wonder whether integration ever happened within the city limits. not to mention, if this woman had been white, they would have sent out the federal reserve.
what surprises me is that i’m still amazed at shit like this.
“Zurana Horton, the 33-year-old pregnant woman, was hit in the head in front of the Lucky Supermarket at Pitkin Ave. and Watkins St. after she threw herself over a group of children, cops and witnesses said.
…If this horrifying episode, which has not yet resulted in an arrest, had happened in Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side neighborhood instead of one of the poorest communities in New York City, news copters would still be flying overhead, and the networks would be all over it. Zurana Horton is a heroine who followed her instincts. Her bravery should not be ignored simply because of her ZIP code.”
Borderline: Vol. 2 - Issue 2 [Anthony Lioi] →
borderlinepoetry.info
Hermes to Persephone, After the March: May 1, 2006
—for Sarah Avery
Listen, sister, don’t get me wrong—
I like it that the dead followed you
from hell to the Washington Metro,
that you surfaced at DuPont Circle
and gave those fascist anti-immigrant
bastards the finger. The finger is a
good thing. Here in Jersey, it means
I just read this out loud. I am still thinking about it.
Borderline: Vol. 2 - Issue 2 [Curtis X. Meyer] →
borderlinepoetry.info
Straight And Upright Position
“A couple who spent a little too long ‘making out’ in the bathroom of a Frontier Airlines plane set off a security alert on Sunday, the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. When passengers noticed they had been in the bathroom for a suspiciously long time,…
the world according to nouns (she's a carnival): the come get your folks bus I: white ethnicities still benefit from white privilege →
rebelrebelbatcat.tumblr.com
Hi! I’m Jessica, and I am a working-class queer white Jew of eastern European and central Asian heritage.
My family came to the US, as many folks did and do, in search of an escape from terrible living conditions and genocide.Does this fact exempt me from benefiting from white privilege?
NOPE.
And that’s why I’m writing this. I see a lot of other white people freak out when white privilege is mentioned and throw up the fact that they’re de facto not racist/don’t benefit from white privilege because they are also ‘white ethnics’ whose families came over after slavery. White privilege isn’t about your family’s history, though. It’s about how society treats you in the here and now. And mostly, to society, my ‘ethnicity’ is invisible, meaning I am seen as, at least in terms of my race, part of the dominant culture. There is some good writing out there on how we became absorbed into the white mainstream, though some of it lapses into weird justification of a ‘difference’ that isn’t there. When we talk about who suffers from racial profiling and targeting, it isn’t me. Other white people will sit next to me on the bus before they sit next to black people or brown people (I just watched this happen)! We don’t get discriminated against for housing in the same way. Predatory lenders didn’t target us in the same way. I could go on.
This doesn’t mean that anti-semitism isn’t a thing, or that my own personal identity isn’t marginalized and fetishized to some degree. But it is not the same for me. Obviously the idea of a monolithic POC experience is ridiculous, but there is a monolithic white experience in that we are not forced by social, legal and cultural mechanisms to confront the fact of our race every day. That is why using your ethnicity as an excuse to perpetuate white supremacy, racism and ignorance is gross. Cut it out.
There are white ethnic experiences worth unpacking, and I would love to have that conversation, but it needs to take place with an awareness of white privilege firmly in place.
NOTE: All of this shit has been said before by people of color. I am writing this on the bus so I can’t link any resources right now, but I will. I’m writing this because I think part and parcel of being a white anti-racist ally is education; the onus should not be on POC here to do the educating. I don’t want to speak FOR anyone though.
Bolded for emphasis. Okay white folks, here’s another tumblr for you to follow.
I got a set of word magnets from Maureen Johnson's book thingy
Kind of like a little magnetic poetry set only there aren’t that many words and one of them is just a picture of a jar - so I kind of viewed it as a limited magnetic prose set.
But anyway, I stuck them on my fridge and just went to go get some water and found that one of my roommates rearranged some of them to spell out “today I will eat everything.”
And I decided that if that doesn’t count as poetry, then I don’t know what does.
the life and times of jannat m.: Actually, the Confederate Flag IS about fucking racism. →
thatprettyoddfeminist.tumblr.com
THE CONFEDERATE FLAG IS NOT ABOUT FUCKING RACISM.
God damnit, if anything pisses me off more it’s when people pull the damn race card.
There is going to be an option for a new license plate in Texas with a little confederate flag on it.
But people are…GRRRRRL ^ You right for dat!
sigh will some one please find the quote that the creators of the confederacy had said about whites being superior to blacks and about the war really actually legit being about racism?
Cuz the Op really needs it.Found it!!!! And I quote:
The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away… Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the “storm came and the wind blew, it fell.”
Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.
Said by the Confederate VP, Alexander Stephens in 1861. So OP is a dumb ass.
White Southerners. Learn this. Signed, one of you.
“
Suddenly there was a loud banging at the door and voices shouting “Police!” and “Policia!” When no one answered, the agents tried to force the door open. Scared, Jesus hid in a closet. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents began hitting objects against the bedroom windows, trying to break in. Without a search warrant and without consent, the ICE agents eventually knocked in the front door and shattered a window, shouting racial slurs and storming into the bedrooms, holding guns to their heads. When asked if they had a warrant, one agent reportedly said, “We don’t need a warrant, we’re ICE,” and, gesturing to his genitals, “the warrant is coming out of my balls.”
…
The ACLU and ACLU of Tennessee this week filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of fifteen residents of the apartment complex who were subjected to this large-scale, warrantless raid by ICE agents and Metro Nashville police officers. Among the plaintiffs are U.S. citizens, including a child detained and interrogated while playing soccer on the playground simply because of the color of his skin. Looking Latino and speaking Spanish is not enough to justify probable cause for questioning and arresting a person. Another plaintiff was carted away in handcuffs in front of his frightened and crying children.
” —that comment about the warrant coming from his balls—make no mistake of it, this type of sexual aggression during these raids is completely normal. The first raid that I covered had agents with guns forcing women to expel milk from their breasts to prove they were lactating (those who are breastfeeding children are often released for humanitarian reasons—not becuase ICE/the government is kind and cares—but because of legal human rights laws)—while the women were expelling milk, agents were mooing at them and making nasty sexualized comments.
it really hits home about how sexual violence is so intimately connected to control and power…
(via midwestmountainmama)
I shouldn’t be surprised that even the local media in Nashville that isn’t totally no-count is not reporting this. Get on the stick, y’all.
“I’m so sorry to hear that life is getting you down at the moment. Goodness knows, it can be so tough when nothing seems to fit and little seems to be fulfilling. I’m not sure there’s any specific advice I can give that will help bring life back its savour. Although they mean well, it’s sometimes quite galling to be reminded how much people love you when you don’t love yourself that much.”
—
Letters of Note: It will be sunny one day
Letter from Stephen Fry to a fan who wrote to him with help about her depression.
The rest of the letter talks about his depression/anxiety as weather analogy, which I find really helpful.
(via craftastrophies)
“sometimes quite galling” - yes, this. galling and shame-spiral-inducing.
things will get better
things will get better
things will get better
lather. rinse. repeat.
Esoterica: Not directed at anyone in particular. →
karnythia.tumblr.com
One of two most common portrayals of trans women is that we are ugly, shambling pseudo-feminine not-women. Being shocked by a trans women who is conventionally pretty or dropping the “I never would have known you were trans!” is cissexist. I’m not saying you can’t compliment a trans…
Esoterica: Please take a moment to help, don't just scroll over this. →
karnythia.tumblr.com
((Click here for more details.))
On October 3rd, 2011, 19 year old Pvt. Danny Chen was found dead in his barracks from a gunshot wound to the head while stationed in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. He died supporting Operation Enduring freedom, but the…
FBI Changes Official Definition of Rape →
feministing.com
The FBI currently defines rape as “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will”, which, as Vanessa explained back in April, excludes statutory rape, same-sex rape, forced anal or oral sex, rape with an object and victims who are male or transgender or have disabilities, not to mention those who have taken drugs or alcohol and therefore had their ability to consent
The Uniform Crime Report Subcommittee voted unanimously to change the definition of rape, which had not been changed for 80 years (!) and rape will now be defined as, “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”
Now if we can get the ALI to similarly reform the Model Penal Code on rape and sexual assault, so the states will follow suit…
