Beth McCarthy gives trans fan new name

Queer joy detected!

i think something that is often overlooked in conversations about platonic and romantic relationships in media and the argument that “two people can just be friends” is that a big part of being queer, for me personally at least, is that i am deeply in love with my friends and would do absolutely anything for them and this sentiment alone opposes the heteronormative idea that your friends are supposed to play a secondary role in your life after a certain point. my friends are not just my friends. they’re not just anything. they’re my friends.

Tiktok post by @ djdott64 (he/him).

I LOVE YOU OLD/ADULT TRANS PEOPLE!!! MAY ALL TRANSGENDER AND GENDER QUEER PEOPLE GET TO SEE OLD AGE, GREY HAIR AND JOY !!

The day I started testosterone, my wife found him on Tiktok. He was starting the same day I did. I felt like I was holding hands with him, going on this journey together. Seeing him again, happy with himself, loving himself, flourishing even though he had to wait so long, fills me with incredible joy and pride. It's never too late to be yourself. <3

As an older queer, allow me to say: the walls of the closet are load-bearing. It is our job as a community to stand in front of that door and tell everyone who wants to peek inside to fuck off.

There are so many reasons a person may choose not to come out and there is no reason a person would owe the public or a stranger that information. Certainly it's not owed simply because someone is famous.

We have fought for decades to make it safer for people to be open and authentic about themselves, but we are not yet there. And even if we were, the closet would still be something we need to maintain for those who are not ready to reveal that part of themselves.

i love being bisexual and nonbinary. i have not and never will make a decision in my entire life

The mind strains to conjure up any soul who can throw a fit as fiercely as Gonzo can

"irreversible side effects of HRT" all of life is irreversible. i cannot go back a single second in time

also i know what i want. i know the risks. everything has risk. i am already living! why am i living half a life because of what YOU fear? stop talking down to transsexuals

Sexting with an nb person who's genital situation you don't know and you know it doesn't matter so you don't ask and you're like. Do you wanna put your whatever in my mouth

if you are NONBINARY and/or BISEXUAL and also POLYAMOROUS

Your inability to ✌️"just choose"✌️ is a gift, a strength in a world constantly forcing false dichotomies upon us!

Shoutout to my dad who asked me what asexual meant and when I told him he said “it sounds like you need to get laid” and to my mom who asked me what being genderfluid was and then said “why does any of that have to do with gender. Just do whatever you want” and then to my dad again who I told I wasn’t cis and who responded “I think more important than being a man or a woman is being an adult” and then right back to my bio mom who said “if you want to be a boy just do it already. Why do you care what I think. You were cooler when you were 8 and didn’t give a shit about anyone’s opinion”. Neither of you get it but you’re still pretty chill

Everyone’s getting shirts for christmas I decided

Adding more pride shirts specifically designed for my family’s unique situation

Thank god soulmates (one person destined for you that you will never be happy without) aren't real but soulmates (people you understand and connect with on a special level, multiple, some of which you havent met yet) are real

being queer and seeing historical queer love is like a punch to the gut in a good way every time

crying and sobbing crying and sobbing etc

some more vintage photographs that make me weep and wail, now including trans people!

why be radically exclusionary abt queerness when you could be radically inclusionary instead. let's inflate the numbers. let's become the majority. the sky's the limit

"we can't let just ANYONE call themselves queer!!" what are you talking about. I'm steepling my fingers and gleefully cackling every time we Get Another One and you should be too. lock in.

Fuck yeah, let's make this little raft we're surviving on big as hell. If I bring my bit of driftwood and you bring yours and we let as many people join in as want to, we might end up with a functional boat.

I heard someone say 'queer is that which accepts queerness' a few weeks ago and I've been thinking about it ever since.

Back when I was active on AVEN (I have no idea what it's like now), we had two definitions of asexual -- an external definition and an internal definition. The external definition, the one that's on the wiki and the press material and that everyone uses when talking about asexuality, was of course "an asexual is someone who does not experience sexual attraction". The internal definition, the one we kept in mind when talking to each other, was "an asexual is someone who calls themself asexual".

The reason for this was very simple and very practical. In the very early AVEN and immediately pre-AVEN days, back before my time when the disparate ace communities were first finding each other and creating a public online network, there was a fair lot of exclusionist discourse. There are a lot of ways to be asexual, and the early community of course fell prey to the usual infighting about whether someone with a libido counts as asexual, whether someone who chooses to have sex can be asexual (usual tiring Purity Brigade Bullshit), whether someone without a libido counts as asexual (after all, if you have no sex drive, are you sure it's a matter of sexual orientation?), whether ace people count as lgbtq, all the usual nonsense. This worked out the way it pretty much always does -- the inclusionists "win", because exclusionists always break off into smaller and smaller communities so the largest group is, of course, the one where all different kinds of people stick together and welcome each other. And that was AVEN.

And when you're trying to have a strong community and somebody shows up at the gates saying, "hi, I think I'm asexual", it's a fucking horrible idea to start doubting their credentials. They saw the public definition and started calling themselves asexual; they're here, and now they're under the internal definition. An asexual is somebody who calls themself asexual. Sometimes, these people would be frustrated allosexuals, or people choosing to swear off sex, who might not fit the external definition of the term. We made sure that everyone knew the external definition, and there were always conversations about asexuality and how it affected our lives, if they asked us directly what we thought then we'd say "only you can know for sure" and then give our thoughts on the matter for as long as they asked for them, and other than that it wasn't anyone else's fucking business or anyone's place to judge. If people weren't nasty and didn't create problems, they could stay and call themselves whatever they wanted.

Many of these people who didn't fit the strict definition eventually left after receiving support and discovering more about themselves. Some stopped IDing as ace but became allies to the community. Some people who came in with the most "I'm a heterosexual girl who is angry at my boyfriend" intro posts you've ever seen in your life discovered that they were in fact ace and that the messages that society had taught them about sex and romance were simply not for them -- these are people who, in a gatekept community, would have been incorrectly ousted immediately.

And then there were people -- a LOT of people -- who found themselves in grey areas. People who said "okay, this community makes sense to me and is useful to me and I have so much in common with a lot of you, but not EXACTLY like you. However, what I experience may not be the strict default definition but it's an awful lot like these other members on the forum." And they formed sub-communities. The grey aces. The demisexuals. The aromantics and greyromantics. Through these dialogues, between subgroups who in a more exclusionary community would be arguing about who the "real" asexuals are and splintering off into their own communities away from all those stupid cishet fakers, we developed language to describe our similarities and differences. The sexual/romantic/aesthetic attraction model came out of these dialogues and it became so massively important to our understanding of asexuality that basically everyone in the ace/aro community describes themselves by it, as do a large number of people outside the community. The community made massive leaps ahead in just a decade or two by, well, being a community. By being a place where anybody who called the place home, and didn't bully other people in the home, was right. By being somewhere where anybody who saw "asexual: someone who doesn't experience sexual attraction" and thought "that sounds like a term with some use for me" was allowed to use it.

An asexual is somebody who does not experience sexual attraction.

An asexual is somebody who calls themselves asexual.

These definitions are not in conflict -- they are both, in concert, fundamentally necessary for a safe and vibrant community where we can protect, support, and learn about each other and ourselves.

And that is absolutely not exclusive to asexual communities.

do y'all even know how much i hate being an "elder queer" at 40? a whole goddamn generation before me was wiped out by a plague that politicians deemed not their problem bc it was killing the "right" people. like. this was OPENLY STATED. i spent a large chunk of my childhood going to funerals. nevermind the fact that killing queer people for being queer wasn't codified into law as a hate crime until i was a junior in high school.

i should NOT be an elder queer, i should be middle at most. i am a middle aged queer. most of the elder queers died.

when i was growing up i didn't go to pride parades, i went to pride marches. because that's 100% what they were in the 80s and 90s.

from the absolute bottom of my heart, LEARN OUR FUCKING HISTORY. a generation was nearly wiped out so you young queers could be here. don't let that have been in vain, please.

the fact that people have reblogged this and tagged it "q slur" makes me want to eat glass.

hey I love you rural lgbt people who have no desire to leave where you live you shouldn't let anyone make you feel like you have to leave your home.

we’ve got a whole booklist for y’all over at the Queer Liberation Library 🌈 📚

benedick & beatrice. their disdain for the institution of marriage is met with disapproval they do not conform to gender roles the idea of a romantic relationship between them is initially comedic they fail at expressing attraction in every socially expected way they are hesitant to love in public for fear of being mocked & THAT is why they resonate with the queer audience!

their community is like "you will love just like the rest of us" ("in time the savage bull doth bear the yoke" "i hope to see you one day fitted with a husband") & they either won't do it ("i will live a bachelor" "adam's sons are my brethren, and truly i hold it a sin to match in my kindred") or can't do it the way everyone else does ("i cannot woo in festival terms" "i will depart unkissed") & then when they DO court & marry they are not ceding their selves they are expressing a love that is unlike anyone else's & that is fulfilling enough to be worth it!