Since joining Tumblr, I’ve met a lot of young queer people. Look, I’m a bisexual man in a gay relationship, and I’m approaching 30. I was still a kid when Matthew Shepard’s story was being covered on the news. I remember thinking, “I better keep my mouth shut about these feelings I’m having.”
And then I met Dominic when I was 12, and people could see how in love we were. And we got the shit beat out of us. The year I met him, some kids in the grade above me held me down against the bleachers in our gym and stomped on my hand until my fingers broke. Instead of sending me to the nurse, the teacher sent me to the assistant principal to explain the situation. She asked why the kids had beat me up. I said, “They were calling me gay.”
Her response was, “Well, are you?”
My, “I don’t know,” earned a call to my parents, and I was outed. Efforts were made to keep me from seeing Dom. Throughout high school, Dom’s stepmother intensified these efforts. He slept in the basement of the house. Although he was an incredibly talented student, he was prohibited from participating in any extracurriculars. He suffered a lot of physical abuse during those years.
The day he turned 18, he packed up everything he had and walked to my house, and we’ve lived together ever since. Things are better, but they’re not perfect. I’ve had trucks pull up next to me at stoplights and, seeing the pride sticker on my car, through old drinks and garbage into my window. I no longer speak to my dad’s side of the family. I haven’t been to see them for Christmas or Thanksgiving in years. One of my uncles had cornered me at Thanksgiving when I was 17 and said, “I’m not going to judge you, but I’d be happy to break your neck so God can do the judging a little sooner.”
I joined a support group for trans and intersex people. When I joined, 40 people attended regularly. Within the year, the group was half the size it had been. Some couldn’t make it anymore, because they were staying at the shelter, where their stay hinged on them agreeing to instead to attend homophobic sermons. Some were put in correctional therapy. Five of them died. Three of those, I didn’t know, but I knew Alex, the 19 year old who was fag-dragged in Kentucky and died a day later in the hospital, and I knew Stephanie, who went home to Alabama to care for her mom in hospice and was beaten to death with a baseball bat by her mom’s boyfriend.
Tumblr is not reality. The dynamic here does not reflect the dynamic out there. Here’s the part where I finally make a point, and it might be extremely unpopular - but guys, value your allies.Value each other. We are met with enough hate in our daily lives to enter an online safe-space and meet more hate from our own, over petty things. Don’t go after one another over every little thing you find problematic.
Learn to see nuance. Maybe the word “queer” bothers you, and you see a gay man using it as an umbrella term. Maybe someone called a trans man a trans woman because they’re confused about terminology, but the post where they did it was voicing support for the trans community. Maybe someone is just asking a question, wanting to learn more. Stop. Attacking. These. People.
Allies are being driven away. Members of our own community are being ostracized. Others are feeling nervous and estranged, and it’s largely because of places like Tumblr, where the social justice movement is quickly becoming violent and radical. I am begging you, stop nitpicking “problematic” things and start directing your efforts to create real change. When it comes to comes to your allies, forget the “social justice warrior” mentality and put down your torch. Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving. And I’m certainly not saying that your anger doesn’t have a good place - when you are met with bigots on the street, congress members who want to pass hateful laws, violent protesters, abusive parents, prejudiced teachers, that is when you need to be a warrior. That’s when it counts. In the real world. When you have the opportunity to protect people from real harm. Attacking your would-be allies via anonymous asks is just going to lose us ground in the long run. And we don’t have time for that, not when trans women of color are being murdered every day, not when states are still fighting against marriage equality, not when there are politicians in office who believe that trans people are possessed by demons, not when we’ve just lost 50 brothers and sisters to one gunman, not when the media won’t even admit that the attack was homophobic.
Please step back. Look at the big picture. Look at where we are, globally. Don’t just log on to your safe space and attack your allies over small missteps. That’s like washing the dishes in a house that’s on fire, kids. Let’s fight on the battlefield, and when we come home to each other, let’s just focus on bandaging up our wounds so we can go out and win the war.
Signal boost to this unbelievably important message.
I’d reblog this a thousand times if I could.
Stop attacking allies. Educate. Not hate.
This is incredibly important. Please read!
Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving.
Gonna Reblog this every time
This seems even more relevant today given that I just read an article about how acceptance of LGBT+ people seems to be dropping among young people. That’s a horrifying and embarrassing statistic when apparently it’s gone up steadily for the last several years.
Driving people who want to help and support away is literally the last thing that should be happening- and it will happen, if the experience these people have with the community is hostility.
and still there are people who think we [women] are exaggerating when we say men will literally kills us for denying their advances.
not only did he kill her. he took her fucking head off and posted it for everyone to see.
Please be careful with ace positivity tags right now, people have been posting images of her body in those tags.
A few days before she was killed a she posted a selfie on Instagram tagged #ThisIsWhatAsexualLooksLike. And now she’s dead for not having sex with a man. I never want to hear an exclusionist say we’re not oppressed ever again.
Please, for the love of god, reblog this and know her name. Bianca Devins. She was asexual, and she was killed for rejecting sexual advances. This is the violence and fear we’ve been trying to speak out about. If you call yourself an activist, this cannot be ignored. Please support and protect aces, this kind of event is literally what exclusionists have been ignoring and mocking the concept of for years.
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I’m considering coming out to my family as non-binary, and so today I brought up the subject of non-binary gendering/transgendering with my Dad as a casual conversational topic. He’s told me that if somebody is born a boy then they “should stay a fucking boy” and not trans to a girl or be a boy some days/girl other days/genderless other days.
I told him that I think gender identity should be something one can choose for themselves, and he says that nobody thinks like that and anybody who is trans/non-binary will just be shunned by every member of society they meet. He doesn’t think that people support n-b/t communities, because he doesn’t. He says to me that not staying one’s natural gender is wrong and against the point of being born a boy/girl.
Every person who reblogs this will have their URL written in a full-size writing book and when it is full I will show it to my father to illustrate to him the amount of people who believe that being non-binary is a valid gender identity.