BREAKING: 21-year-old protester, Kaden Rummler, was shot point-blank in the face by ICE. he just spoke about how he’s blind for life and almost died:

“I will be blind for life. I have fractures in my skull that they can't fix. They pulled a piece of plastic the size of a nickel out of my eye. I had shards of metal, glass, and plastic behind my eye and in my skull. They said it was a miracle I survived.”

What the hell is wrong with these people?

GoFundMe for Kaden Rummler, the young trans man blinded by ICE agents this week.

Fundraiser for K R by Sarah Gallimore : Help ICE Protestor After being shot by Feds

queer people on this site really make me feel like a confused straight guy at pride. the discourse here could kill a man

"why polyamorous people aren't valid" "mspec lesbians AREN'T okay actually" "aroallos are freaks" "he/him dni. cis men dni" "this post is for non-men only" yessss and the one with long hair goes in the girl box, then the one with short hair goes in the boy box!!

maybe I'm just a boring he/him white guy but inventing about 7 trillion terms to define "man" and "woman" so you can reinforce gender essentialism isn't very "love is love" of you. maybe i just don't have a sexuality but picking and choosing what sexualities are normal and which ones are "weird and predatory" sounds like we're all a bunch of republicans on fox news. if you attend your local pride parade and look REAAALLLYYY closely, you'll notice you can't actually tell if someone's gay or not from their appearance, and there's no way to know if they're "invading queer spaces". maybe it's just me, but when i attended my local gaybar last night for the drag show, they didn't ask for my gay-card with a peer reviewed diagnosis of faggot stamped on it. they just let me in the building. i live a life of bliss and luxury in not caring about any queer discourse ever, and just going "WHATEVER MAKES YOU HAPPY :-)" while booting up the latest cod game. and it seems much more fun than whatever the fuck you people are on about

muting my notifs for this post but i need to acknowledge this first. My favorite tags fr 🙏

I am forever of the opinion that SO many people would be so much happier if they stopped trying to fit their relationships and feelings into "just friends" and "romantic partners". man those are two boxes. twoooo. you are an entire living being. you are alive and your brain is full of electric signals and your body is sending crazy chemicals all over the place. you cannot always cram your experiences into two neat cookie cutter shapes. you are alive on this stupid gay earth please relax and have fun. I love you

some of you need to look up alterous attraction and relationship anarchy and queerplatonicism. and some of you need to stop policing other peoples' relationships because you're uncomfortable that they don't fit into your two funny boxes. my wizard wisdom

Guys if you want queer shit written by queers on our own terms you're going to have to start seeking out weird independent media. I'm sorry that's the only place you can regularly find it idk what to tell you, we can't keep acting like there's nothing if we're not getting blockbusters and triple A titles or whatever it is we're waiting around for. The thing you keep saying you want is already being offered for free by one person making a passion project on the internet and you would both benefit enormously if you interacted with it instead of lamenting that the only options we have for representation are pandering afterthoughts from corporate shit

I say this with so, so much care: Real queer shit written by real queers can and will sometimes make you uncomfortable. That's one of the defining features of weird, independent queer media. And weird independent media more broadly. Art that comes from true individual passion and authenticity has edges and bite to it that mass market corporate products intentionally do not. Has a rawness that can offend.

You are allowed to feel uncomfortable about it. But don't ask for queers to self censor for your comfort.

Queer Slur Heritage Post

the people who deliberately misunderstand youth liberation really piss me off as an adult who was once a kid who wanted to run away and, while literally running away from home, realized they had nowhere else to go but back home. nowhere. no where! the only place i could go was back home to my abusive parents. youth liberation is creating a society wherein i, as a child, would have had a safe place to go that was not my home, where i could prioritize my and my brother's safety.

youth liberation is what helps children get the medical support they need, even if their parents are neglectful.

youth liberation educates the child so that the child has the necessary language to speak on their own behalf, as an agent of themselves with autonomy over themselves.

youth liberation demands we treat all children as what they are: future adults, who at all times have the right to autonomy over their body, and a right to a life free from abuse and exploitation. it would deny parents the ability to force (in the case of intersex "correction" surgeries) or deny medical care, deny them the ability to isolate and control their children through regulated forms of education like in homeschooling, and would instead give that power to the child and the child alone.

youth liberation is not only about preventing abuse before it happens, by demanding that children are treated with respect and as full agents over themselves, it is also about creating a supportive society that allows children to escape abusive situations to a community-based safe space.

everyone trying to argue youth lib is about "letting pedophiles hang out with children" are not only engaging in some of the most deliberate bad faith possible, they're purposefully ignoring the fact youth liberation would also protect and prevent child sexual abuse, which relies upon children being - to a certain extent - trapped, with no ability to leave the situation they're in themselves, at the hands of statistically family members, relatives, family friends, known babysitters, etc. children can only be trapped if they have nowhere else to go.

csa also relies on poor sex education - in fact, every single assault i faced was due to me not having been taught that what i experienced was assault at all. i was raised in an abusive home, and i came to earnestly believe that a relationship with a man necessitated my allowing him to use my body however he wanted, because that's what i saw growing up. my parents were poor educators, only giving us books they purchased about sex education for kids for us to read alone.

youth liberation is necessary, and any who tries to paint youth lib as evil, as a "pedophile" movement, is choosing to view the collective desire of abused kids and former kids who were abused - their desire for a better world where their abuse wouldn't have happened - as something destructive and negative and that's just disgusting to me. youth liberation now.

i truly think that this recent trend of “if you relate to a post about a different identity than your own you are ~derailing~ and taking over the conversation” is incredibly harmful.

i recently experienced some pretty severe transphobic abuse in my workplace (children’s home) that included having food thrown at me, being called slurs, being told i was a pervert because i am trans. one of the managers talked with me afterwards and shared that he had had a similar experience as an Asian man. this wasn’t him derailing my experience, or talking over me, or making things about himself. he was communicating “hey, i know how it feels and how much it sucks. you’re not alone.”

THAT is what solidarity IS. i don’t know what it’s like to be Asian, he doesnt know what it’s like to be trans, but we both had a similar experience and we were able to turn a horrible experience into an opportunity for bonding and comfort.

stop looking at people’s attempts as solidarity as an attack. and hey, you never know - you could find an opportunity to grow closer to other people.

Dr. Alan Hart, a trans man from the USA who pioneered the use of X-ray photography in tuberculosis detection (saving countless lives according to researchers), was "reclaimed" by the lesbian community after his death in 1962, which means he was deadnamed and described as "a women loving woman who had to transition because at the time transsexualism was a quick medicine against sexism and homophobia" by numerous gay and lesbian associations and activists (including Jonathan Ned Katz whom I just quoted and who received many awards for his contributions to... I don't know, transphobia against trans men I guess), even though his widow always expressed how offensive it was to both her and her husband to refer to them as lesbians.

Hart was on testosterone, legally changed his name, and had gotten a hysterectomy (that was described as "unfortunate" by the Right to Privacy gay and lesbian political action committee), making him the first documented trans man to transition in the USA, yet he was characterized as a lesbian woman because cis gays and lesbians had the nerve (when do they NOT have the nerve, dare I say) to think they had the right to "honor [his] life as a woman" by having fundraiser dinners with his deadname attached to them, having college lectures where they talked about him as a lesbian hero, and using she pronouns for him until 2000. The USAmerican trans community, including trans activist Lou Sullivan, had to fight to defend Hart's identity and to have his manhood recognized by the wider community by protesting these lectures and dinners and having a conversation with the Portland chapter of the Lesbian Avengers association, which ended up having a favorable response and joining the trans community in the battle.

I want to end this by reporting the words of Candice Hellen Brown, a trans woman from Portland who wrote a letter to Just Out magazine in 1994 defending Hart's transness:

Think about this story every time the "trans men never contributed to anything in history" discourse resurfaces again. If this can happen to a famous historical figure from the USA and from a relatively recent time who medically transitioned and was explicitly out as a trans man, imagine how many others from other countries, historical periods, and situations have been erased or "reclaimed".

https://thetransgenderdictionary.com/in_memoriam#alan_l_hart

hi can you name one transmasc congressman 👍

This is wild because restricting HRT for trans women, but keeping access for trans men has NEVER been a stated goal of people who advocate for trans men. However, multiple transphobic trans women have specifically advocated for more gatekeeping of HRT for trans men and mascs.

This is insane to me because transmasc hrt is already more heavily regulated than transfem hrt.

shaming people for not perceiving sex as something strictly romantic needs to stop and i’m so serious. it absolutely can be romantic. if you want it to be. but for the love of god stop judging people who don’t see it that way and openly tell you that before anything happens to make sure you know. newsflash! not everyone is interested in romance. not everyone experiences romantic attraction. and you know what? that’s okay!

so next time you want to whine about someone communicating their feelings about sex and romance to you on your first date or whatever like a decent person does, shut up. just shut up and move on. there are people out there who want the same thing as you do. don’t shame everyone else.

Unironically I think the early to mid 20s age group in America has unbelievably bad consent boundaries on all levels and so much language to defend it but this makes me sound like elon musk if I say it however the commonality of someone who will be like “I had 47 panic attacks and it’s your fault” if you tell them no is insane

I rejected someone and got called “the scariest person I’ve ever met” with so much therapy speak interspersed like alright okay alright okay alright okay

“You just say whatever you’re thinking and I don’t know how to handle it” was verbatim part of this conversation. Also everyone hates to see an autistic bitch

When I was in this age bracket, there was a huge emphasis on improving consent culture via graceful rejection, and it's gone by the wayside. Which sucks.

Twice in my youth (once in high school and once in college) I was in situations where I was asking someone out and I could tell they were calculating in their heads the risks of rejecting me, and both times I said, out loud, "you can say no, I wouldn't have asked if I wasn't prepared for either answer." And then they said no. This wasn't some spark of special wisdom I had - I knew to do it because feminist conversations among my age group brought it up regularly. This isn't happening nearly enough anymore.

More recently, I was really glad when we got to "rejection sensitive dysphoria" in my IOP program and it was one of those symptoms where the therapists really emphasized how it affects others. Because it does.

Being someone who cannot handle rejection makes you much more likely to violate boundaries, and yes, that includes sexual ones. Yes, you, reader who has never hurt a fly. If you don't want to stumble backwards into sexually assaulting someone, fix your RSD meltdowns. If you keep them up it's only a matter of time. Because if you're nice enough to interact with, but are known to have RSD meltdowns, guess what happens when your friends and acquaintances need to reject you?

my craziest take is you can be cis in a trans way if you feel like it. Like its literally no big deal. if you wanna be completely cisgender but still feel as if you're alienated from your agab then you can be cis in a trans way

you can be cis and give yourself other pronouns too. you can be a woman who's he/him and entirely femme. who cares. Literally who cares

the aromantic community needs to know about perfect days (2023). it is a beautiful slice of life film about hirayama, a ~60 year old japanese toilet cleaner who has a small apartment suited just for himself. he makes meaningful connections with his coworkers, shop workers, and his niece. he also spends a lot of time with his hobbies of photography, collecting cassettes, and reading. he is content and satisfied with his life and at no point in the film does he ever express a desire for a romantic relationship. the life he has has no room for a partner, and he likes it that way

Being aroallo and lovequeer and yearning for a life partnership is an agonizing existence because like how do I explain to alloroses that I want a non-romantic, intimate, life partnership that has sex but no it’s not romance despite how much amatonormativity has taught you that such a relationship looks to be romantic at a surface level and also most aroallos only want fwbs and non-committal hookups and while I do nod my head and tip my hat in solidarity I can’t help but feel a sense of dread and loneliness that I’ll never be able to find someone who wants the same kind of relationship I do.

anytime someone writes a post about aromantic people in a relationship and specifically aroallo people there will be some asshole in the notes going "as long as you don't lead the other person on it's fine ❤️" and it pisses me off because I *know* they mean "explain everything about your attraction to the other party or you're a selfish bitch" and it's so fucking infuriating. how about YOU explain yourself for a change. how about YOU explain how important romance and/or sex is to you. how about you stop thinking of yourself as someone who doesn't have to be vulnerable and tell the other person what you want. how about that

How long before we start seeing cases like these for just being queer? Do we have to get to that stage for people to start to mobilize against this loudly? We can't let the fight against internet censorship and puritan outrage against NSFW content be another controlled narrative by the right wing grifters.