why is it that at least once a month someone i'm following that was previously chill suddenly comes out as violently transphobic towards trans men, reblogs as many "trans men need to shut up & die" posts as possible, & then pretends this is normal. the world would genuinely be a better place without these people in it
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
If you're in the US, now is a great time to talk to the young people in your life about the US military:
- The recruiter is not your friend. The military employs child psychologists to learn how to make you think the recruiter is your friend.
- The recruiter is allowed to lie to you and makes more money if they do.
- The recruiter is paid a commission to groom children into cannon fodder.
- The recruiter will tell you you're special and will go into special smart soldier programs instead of combat. They're lying.
- The recruiter may tell you they can tell if someone can get PTSD or not and only recruit people like you, who won't. They're lying.
- The recruiter may tell you you'll be too busy attending free college (!!) to go overseas. They're lying.
- The recruiter may ask what countries you want to travel to and promise you bougie placements on military bases in those countries. They're lying.
- Even "It's just four years!" is a lie - the government is allowed to hold you past your enlistment period with a stop-loss order.
- The recruiter actually has zero power to decide anything that happens to you after you enlist and they more importantly don't care what happens to you.
- If you enlist, you will be brainwashed to make you willing to do things to other humans that you would never be willing to do today.
- You will be ordered to do things that will kill children. And you'll do them.
- The military is not the only way or even the best way for you to go to college or start a career.
- Military brainwashing will actually make you into a terrible university student because it degrades your ability to think critically and question your sources.
- Having PTSD and/or a TBI will make it harder to be a student and keep a job.
- Veterans' benefits suck these days.
- Being a veteran drastically increases your risk of homelessness, suicide, alcohol and drug dependence, prison time, and becoming an abuser to your loved ones.
- The military will expose you to chemicals that will drastically increase your chances of developing cancer.
- The military will withhold information about your rights to conscientiously object after enlisting.
- A lot can change in four years.
All of this!
If you want an organization who WILL tell you the truth about your rights to conscientiously object, how to legally get out of the DEP (Delayed Entry Program) or about any of your other rights in the military (whether you’re enlisted, thinking about enlisting, or a family member or friend of someone enlisted (or thinking about enlisting)), who will do it confidentially & for free, you want the
GI Rights Hotline
run by NGOs & non-profits, which has been counseling folks for DECADES now:
Or by phone:
1-877-447-4487
Even if all the person you're speaking to cares about is the money, the money sucks.
Minimum wage in California just went up to $16.90. You need to be rank E4 or be E3 with at least 3 years of service before you're making more than the CA minimum wage in the military.
You will literally get better pay and benefits working at a costco. (And that's not even accounting for the fact that the military isn't a 40 hour work week, your entire life is on the clock)
I cannot emphasize this enough, if you're a desperate young queer person you will make better money, get better healthcare, and have more affordable options for school if you move to California, get a job at costco, live with roommates, and go to community college than you will have if you join the US military.
If you're in the US, now is a great time to talk to the young people in your life about the US military:
- The recruiter is not your friend. The military employs child psychologists to learn how to make you think the recruiter is your friend.
- The recruiter is allowed to lie to you and makes more money if they do.
- The recruiter is paid a commission to groom children into cannon fodder.
- The recruiter will tell you you're special and will go into special smart soldier programs instead of combat. They're lying.
- The recruiter may tell you they can tell if someone can get PTSD or not and only recruit people like you, who won't. They're lying.
- The recruiter may tell you you'll be too busy attending free college (!!) to go overseas. They're lying.
- The recruiter may ask what countries you want to travel to and promise you bougie placements on military bases in those countries. They're lying.
- Even "It's just four years!" is a lie - the government is allowed to hold you past your enlistment period with a stop-loss order.
- The recruiter actually has zero power to decide anything that happens to you after you enlist and they more importantly don't care what happens to you.
- If you enlist, you will be brainwashed to make you willing to do things to other humans that you would never be willing to do today.
- You will be ordered to do things that will kill children. And you'll do them.
- The military is not the only way or even the best way for you to go to college or start a career.
- Military brainwashing will actually make you into a terrible university student because it degrades your ability to think critically and question your sources.
- Having PTSD and/or a TBI will make it harder to be a student and keep a job.
- Veterans' benefits suck these days.
- Being a veteran drastically increases your risk of homelessness, suicide, alcohol and drug dependence, prison time, and becoming an abuser to your loved ones.
- The military will expose you to chemicals that will drastically increase your chances of developing cancer.
- The military will withhold information about your rights to conscientiously object after enlisting.
- A lot can change in four years.
All of this!
If you want an organization who WILL tell you the truth about your rights to conscientiously object, how to legally get out of the DEP (Delayed Entry Program) or about any of your other rights in the military (whether you’re enlisted, thinking about enlisting, or a family member or friend of someone enlisted (or thinking about enlisting)), who will do it confidentially & for free, you want the
GI Rights Hotline
run by NGOs & non-profits, which has been counseling folks for DECADES now:
Or by phone:
1-877-447-4487
Even if all the person you're speaking to cares about is the money, the money sucks.
Minimum wage in California just went up to $16.90. You need to be rank E4 or be E3 with at least 3 years of service before you're making more than the CA minimum wage in the military.
You will literally get better pay and benefits working at a costco. (And that's not even accounting for the fact that the military isn't a 40 hour work week, your entire life is on the clock)
I cannot emphasize this enough, if you're a desperate young queer person you will make better money, get better healthcare, and have more affordable options for school if you move to California, get a job at costco, live with roommates, and go to community college than you will have if you join the US military.
Us Americans failing to understand that this goes beyond Trump is pissing me off so much.
This is not only about Trump. This is about YOUR government. About Latinoamérica's history with you. It's about the occupation, the coups YOUR government orchestrated years ago that resulted in so many deaths. It's about the multiple threats that your government have done against Mexico about annexing them. The interventions that over and over and over again you keep pushing against the rest of us and God forgive I start talking specifically about the interventions on Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Puerto Rico and now the occupation of Venezuela.
It's the fact that some of you laugh at us when we worry about what president you choose because you FAIL TO UNDERSTAND HOW IT IMPACT THE REST OF US.
How many times do we have to keep seeing USA playing the "savior" card till you admit that there is something terribly wrong with all of it?
Us Americans failing to understand that this goes beyond Trump is pissing me off so much.
This is not only about Trump. This is about YOUR government. About Latinoamérica's history with you. It's about the occupation, the coups YOUR government orchestrated years ago that resulted in so many deaths. It's about the multiple threats that your government have done against Mexico about annexing them. The interventions that over and over and over again you keep pushing against the rest of us and God forgive I start talking specifically about the interventions on Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Puerto Rico and now the occupation of Venezuela.
It's the fact that some of you laugh at us when we worry about what president you choose because you FAIL TO UNDERSTAND HOW IT IMPACT THE REST OF US.
How many times do we have to keep seeing USA playing the "savior" card till you admit that there is something terribly wrong with all of it?
the US wants to run Venezuela through just a conglomerate of oil companies. this is pure extractive colonialism and imperialist aggression. not to like be iranian on main but. oil. it's always fucking oil.
the US wants to run Venezuela through just a conglomerate of oil companies. this is pure extractive colonialism and imperialist aggression. not to like be iranian on main but. oil. it's always fucking oil.
"at least venezuela lost a dictator" "the good thing about trump's invasion" "maduro deserved it" oh my god some of you are dangerously susceptible to fascist propaganda.
unfriendly and honestly hostile reminder that trump isn't invading venezuela because maduro is a dictator, or because of drug cartels. he's doing it only and exclusively because they have desirable oil reserves and no other reason. reminder that venezuela is a comparatively poor country that will never financially recover from this. reminder that venezuelans are suffering with the bombing and the air strikes. reminder that trump did it to steal from them and no one did anything. reminder that this sets a dangerous precedent and now all trump has to do to invade another country is claim they're in a dictatorship. reminder that trump is a fascist dictator.
this will only be bad, for venezuelans and for all of latin america (and possibly the whole world) in the long run. trump did this not to help the venezuelans or their country, but to steal their petrol and get away with it. and he will. because that's what dictators do.
"We invaded to help them!" Is just colonizer bullshit 101. Don't fall for it.
If you see the quote "I refuse to share my body with a man who wouldn't defend it politically" or any variation of it floating around the internet — it was Kat Blaque who originally said it and she would really appreciate it if people gave her proper credit for it but it's gone viral on a lot of different platforms and most of the people sharing it don't know it's from her or choose not to credit her on purpose.
Like I just know terfs are going to be parroting it pretending it wasn't said by a black trans woman about herself & her life.
Seeing news outlets already letting them fully get away without even their own lying is insane.
"An extraordinary night time raid" "its unclear whether there was any legal justification" "legal basis currently unknown" etc...
Well that's because it was illegal and they don't care, stop pretending like they are taking tiny steps and checking legality. They just simply want more power to do literally whatever they want to any country in the world and will not stop for anything such as "laws" or basic "ethics"
Also secretary of state has now given a legal justification and its the most laughable thing possible. "The strikes were to protect the soldiers carrying out the operation which we can do"
Oh so the illegal strikes were so you could protect the soldiers illegally there who were kidnapping a sitting foreign president?
Thank god that will hold up in american courts where we will be allowed to prosecute foreign presidents but unable to prosecute US presidents.
Also someone saying "maduro was bad though" yeah but if a leader of a nation being bad was all the justification you needed then where is the 120 nation deep coalition coming to roll the US?
EU has bailed on condemning anything other than the audacity of Venezuela for having the gall to be a target for the US. I didn't expect anything from them and still somehow slipping under the bar.
being a woman isn't a feminist action btw
being a lesbian isn't a feminist action either. It's just a thing
There is nothing inherently evil or wrong about how masculine or feminine you are and I wish people would stop acting like one is better than the other. The way you act and speak as a person says more about what kind of person you are than your gender presentation. There is plenty of people capable of being horrible people and there are plenty of people that are capable of being good people. It's a choice, gender has nothing to do with it.
I think it should be considered a form of degendering to try to divorce trans people from their gendered histories. My gender doesn't make sense without the fact that I was a little boy, or something like it, before I was a girl and a woman. If you were always a girl, thats awesome, but a lot of people project their dysphoria onto me when I try to talk about my own fucking life. If you think talking about having been a boy makes me less of a woman, that is degendering.
The US is bombing my home country Venezuela.
Venezuela has been in a dictatorship as long as I have been alive. Since 1998. My parents are happy about a coup and hope Maduro dies or gets arrested, which yes. Fuck Maduro, fuck Chavismo. But I've read way too much about the history of US dipping their hands into South America, installing puppet states, fucking everything up and this is not a win. Even if Maduro dies or gets arrested, the US just wants the country's resources, they are not magically going to fix everything, there is a corrupt reason for this to be happening that is yet to unfold and I'm so tired. Fuck Trump.
I wish I could find better words to explain this to non-venezuelans, or Venezuelans of an older generation who are just tired of failed "socialism" and beelined straight to far right borderline extremism as if that was better. For now my family back home is safe and I wish every person in Caracas the same.