Leyna Bloom makes history by becoming the first transgender model of color to appear in an issue of Vogue India!

Black trans girls keep making history! So happy for her great representation for TWOC

This incredible 95-year-old transwoman flight instructor found love late in life– only to be denied social security benefits by the government because she’s not cisgender

A beautiful interview with a woman who transitioned in 1976 shows how life for transgender people has changed over the years, although some terrible consequences remain the same.

Gifs: Lambda Legal

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what an amazing lady!

Trans people have always existed 🌈

obsessed with this photo series about trans love by photographer landyn pan (source)

[Image description Tweet from FeoUltima "Kojima would never name a trans woman character Sirona Ryan, he'd name her something like Hard Mommy and trans women all over would go "changing my name to that" in response."]

Source

i feel the need to share my favorite reply to this tweet

Imagine if you will a big and large dog. Your not making it big enough in your mind. Okay now it's good. Picture its favorite food is berries and salmon. You want to pet it, don't you? Well don't. What you've just invented is a bear. And you're under arrest for inventing the bear.

every ICE agent could die right now and they'd all deserve it

every time I'm too scared to pull the trigger on a bluesky post, I know I can post it here. you all get me.

i need an app like tinder just to find people to smoke wit

i’m patenting this shit and calling it “buds”

fellow weedheads, who will kickstart this

“Ahh yes brothere let us meet up and toke together mayhaps you can point me in the direction of your ‘plug’ as they put it roflmao”

[Source article]

More echinoderm fun facts! Not only are echinoderms’ bodies mostly built using the head regions of bilaterian genetics, but they also have a distributed nervous system that all together acts as an all-body brain!

Excerpt:

there's always some bullshit happening on reddit

What day is it? Truly, nobody knows. Even in our go-go era of eternally connected calendar-having computers synchronizing their clocks over NTP (David Mills has our undying gratitude,) it is difficult if not impossible to remember what day of the week it is.

Part of this is because work has taken over the weekend. If you were an office worker in the 1950s, having your boss come into your house and demand that you answer his work-related questions on a Sunday morning would be a hanging offence. The neighbours would come out and help you drag his lifeless corpse through the streets while bored children threw tomatoes at it. Right now? It's a safe bet that you probably have another tab open where you're trying to figure out what some robot that represents your boss has insisted is your top priority.

Mostly, though, it's that we don't look at actual calendars enough. Sure, we stare at the one on our phone that is constantly filling up with multicoloured interlocking bands like some kind of Hell Legos. All we're doing there, though, is staring at the day that's a slightly lighter colour and maybe grimacing while looking at the rainbow of disappointment contained inside the day right next to it.

That's why I think we should get rid of days of the week entirely. Every day could be a weekend now! If your boss doesn't like it, ask him if he really wants to go back to the 1950s. Then invent some kind of new rope we can use to hang robots with. Probably have to make it out of ethernet cable.

once again needing to remind some people that mispronouncing foreign words isn't just about not knowing how to say it; if your language doesn't have that sound, in many cases you can't hear it properly. You won't be able to hear yourself say it wrong because you probably can't distinguish between the sounds a native speaker can. It will sound right to you and you will be wrong.

Most languages use relatively similar sound inventories overall, but make distinctions others don't. And the way the our language centers work is they group these sounds together, allowing us to recognize that things within a given range constitute a recognizable phoneme. If your languages groups together sounds another language makes a distinction between, your brain cannot tell.

So everyone on those posts congratulating themselves for looking up pronunciation and saying "It's Not That Hard?" Surprise, you might have still got it wrong and can't even tell. You can look up the IPA chart and still flub it completely because what sounds right to your brain and what a native speaker will understand are totally different things!

"I might have butchered that, please let me know" is sometimes an excuse for lack of research, but it is, unfortunately, also a much more accurate self-assessment than confidently fucking it up after mouthing along to a wav file a few times.

This is one of the reasons that, historically, many people would take on or be granted new names if they stayed any length of time in another culture; it's very common for the names from one language to simply not map to the sounds of another!

this just in apparently; accents are just affectations and every ESL person who has ever struggled to understand or pronounce a word is a lazy white person

(I first need to say that it is folly to overexamine a slogan, and the slogan as it stands is never intended to be examined; it is a tool for provocation and a rally to do better, and can never be “incorrect.” I am not criticising the intention of the slogan.)

When Black Americans have addressed the genuinely shameful failures of white Americans to pronounce Black names, it is, firstly, absolutely necessary. This has been done in the past with the slogan, “white people can pronounce Tchaikovsky and Schwarzenegger.”

This is intended to highlight the entirely correct point that white Americans have made more efforts to address names that are considered “foreign” and “difficult” but are associated with “white” cultures, than to address Black names. The slogan is provocative, useful, and highlights the hypocrisy of white Americans. It is a challenge to do better. Because Americans often perceive z’s and v’s to be “foreign” and “difficult” it is an especially pointed dig.

However. Let us briefly lump together Americans, all English-speaking Americans of various backgrounds dialects, into one American lump and stand back.

Respectfully: you HAVE to be American to believe that Americans have learned to pronounce “Tchaikovsky” and “Schwarzenegger” correctly.

Although Americans firmly and confidently believe that they can take on “Schwarzenegger,” German speakers… don’t. That’s just not how you say those sounds. One particular letter gets mangled.

It isn’t even an accent problem; you can say it correctly with a strong American accent. The American reinvention of “Schwarzenegger” represents a failure to understand how German sounds work, which is fine - hey, they’re “difficult” and “foreign” - but it is paired with total unearned confidence on the part of ALL Americans of ALL dialects that “of course we know how to say it. It’s a celebrity who was on the TV, he’s a governor, that’s how everyone says it.”

If you listen to Arnold saying HIS OWN NAME, which he does, you can tell that AMERICANS ARE NOT EVEN SAYING HIS NAME LIKE HE DOES. Even British people land a better attempt. It is a function of American cultural hegemony that Americans do not notice this. It is an inherently American view of the world to believe that a consistent, confident mispronunciation of someone’s name is a respectful, educated and correct handling.

(Tchaikovsky is interesting because it’s an Anglicisation of a French version of the spelling of Чайковский, which was possibly settled on because it was the easier way to get English speakers to perceive it. American English tried a different version in his own lifetime, as you can see below, but which would have led to Americans putting a “cow” in it.)

Again, it doesn’t cancel the slogan, the slogan is good-quality - but it shows how this is invisible to those who have not learned otherwise.

Outside of America, all Americans are perceived as American together, and Yanks join the ranks of English speakers. English speakers are famed around the world for having the same “bash and mangle it into something that sounds similar, and insist that it’s correct, because you don’t hear the difference” approach.

It will help in learning other languages to try. It will help a lot to take the loss with grace and accept correction!

Although the OP sort of accidentally implies that you “can’t” hear certain nuanced sounds - it is entirely possible to distinguish and perceive most nuanced sounds even in extremely nuanced languages, with intention and attention and training, especially with the guidance of a native speaker. Even if you can’t get it perfect it is still possible to improve and worthy to try!

IMO of the most fascinating ways for an English native speaker, especially an American one, to understand this is to watch how Mr Yang teaches Chinese students how to use American handling. “Soften up on the K sound” “throw in a little SpongeBob to it” you will suddenly hear things you probably weren’t ready to hear.

Here is a British person making a respectful attempt at Schwarzenegger, followed by Schwarzenegger saying it himself. One person has a British accent, and Schwarzenegger’s Austrian accent is considered distinctive to German speakers, but ideally, once you try to notice it, even if you are American, you should be able to hear what Americans are doing wrong.

making a collection

(yes i took all these from other people who reblogged, not my circus but i need to compile the monkeys)