In an effort to share a little black and queer history during this turbulent Pride month, here’s a comic about one of my favorite musicians, Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
love is so embarrassing . also the only thing that matters
why are so many people on this post saying things like “oh so what abt aromantic people then 🙄” like um… stumbling as u give up your seat for an elderly lady on the bus. stroking your friend’s hair as they cry in your arms. someone you care abt making you a long lovely playlist of songs you might like. attentively listening to your sibling as they talk excitedly about something they care abt. the sound of hundreds of people in unison singing a song they love at a concert. someone peeling a clementine and saving half of it for themselves and giving the other half to you. letting your cat crawl all over you even though her claws are scratchy.
sitting in comfortable silence with someone.
the pride shining in your grandfather’s eyes when you facetime him and tell him abt what you’ve been up to. taking a sip of your friend’s boba. people grinning at you when u blow out the candles on your birthday cake… these things aren’t love to you? you guys don’t consider that love? really? truly?
Just so we’re all clear on where I stand: Black lives matter, trans women are women, trans men are men, nonbinary people are beautiful, asexual/aromantic folks have a place in the LGBTQ community, Queer is not a dirty word, and being “anti fascist” is a moral position, not a political one.
if you disagree with any of these, get the fuck off my blog
Okay, hot take? Bisexual and pansexual are functionally synonyms, and the decision to ID as one or the other comes down to personal preference and interpretation, and any attempt to further separate the two is driving a wedge between two communities that should have nothing but love and solidarity for one another.
We have more in common than not, and the words for our respective identities should not be pitted against each other.
Yeah with overlapping identities like this I just go for whichever one I like the pride flag the most.
That’s so valid.
There is a distinction between pansexual and bisexual but it is a very fine line, so fine that people who fit the definition for pansexual better may ID as bisexual instead for a variety of personal reasons and vice versa. But there is a distinction and acting like they are perfect synonyms can be quite invalidating.
Bisexual - attraction to multiple genders where gender is a factor within the attraction, and can include a preference for one gender over another, or attraction that feels different when it’s directed at a specific gender.
Pansexual- attraction to people regardless of gender. Gender is not a factor, you’d expect a blanket sensation of attraction regardless of which gender it is attracted to, and no sense of intuitive gender preference (though perhaps a logical one).
Notice that neither of these definitions actually exclude transgender or non-binary people and arguing otherwise is biphobic and transphobic. But there is still a distinction - practically, the issues they face and the relationships they will end up in are the same, but emotionally and subjectively they feel different.
Me reading the first post: I totally agree 100% quit telling me that calling myself bisexual means I’m transphobic
Me reading post four: OH I never heard that distinction before. Being attracted to masculine ppl DOES feel different to me than being attracted to feminine ppl. It never occurred to me that pansexual people experienced attraction different from me in that way. Today I have learned something.
Okay, so this is a better explanation than I have seen before, and I’m really glad it crossed my dash. *throws love and support @ my bi and pan friends across the globe bc they’re all valid*
ID: “This Pride remember to respect all trans people : Trans women who don’t shave with a drawing of a woman whit a yellow and pink beard, trans men who don’t bind, masculine trans women and feminine trans men with a drawing of a trans woman with short pink hair wearing a yellow baseball T-shirt holding hands with a trans man with a yellow crop top and short curly blue hair, fat trans people with the drawing of a fat trans woman with short white hair, dark skin and a pink cropped top, disabled trans people with a drawing of a wheelchair and a walking cane in the color of the trans flag, neurodivergent trans people with the symbol of the autistic community, trans people who are sex worker with a drawing of blue bra and pink underwear, poor trans people who can’t afford transition, trans people who aren’t out yet with a drawing of a closed door, trans people who don’t plan on transitioning, black trans people with a black fist holding a trans flag, and any trans people who isn’t white with multiple hands of different skin tones, muslim trans people with a drawing of someone wearing a hijab in the color of the trans flag, jewish trans people with a drawing of someone wearing a white shirt and a kippah in the color of the trans flag, non binary people even those who don’t identify as trans with the non binary flag, those whose identity you might not understand with the genderfluid flag, the agender flag, the demi gender flag and the genderqueer flag, trans people who don’t pass and don’t want to with a drawing of a trans woman with a beard and dark skin raising her fist, every pronouns with dialog box in which are different sets of pronouns, trans people of every identity with the gay flag, the lesbian flag, the ace flag, the bi flag, the pan flag and the aro flag, every trans person is beautiful and deserving of so much love so don’t forget the T.” End ID
P.S. : can someone tell me if I did the image description right cuz I have no idea
When I was younger and more abled, I was so fucking on board with the fantasy genre’s subversion of traditional femininity. We weren’t just fainting maidens locked up in towers; we could do anything men could do, be as strong or as physical or as violent. I got into western martial arts and learned to fight with a rapier, fell in love with the longsword.
But since I’ve gotten too disabled to fight anymore, I… find myself coming back to that maiden in a tower. It’s that funny thing, where subverting femininity is powerful for the people who have always been forced into it… but for the people who have always been excluded, the powerful thing can be embracing it.
As I’m disabled, as I say to groups of friends, “I can’t walk that far,” as I’m in too much pain to keep partying, I find myself worrying: I’m boring, too quiet, too stationary, irrelevant. The message sent to the disabled is: You’re out of the narrative, you’re secondary, you’re a burden.
The remarkable thing about the maiden in her tower is not her immobility; it’s common for disabled people to be abandoned, set adrift, waiting at bus stops or watching out the windows, forgotten in institutions or stranded in our houses. The remarkable thing is that she’s like a beacon, turning her tower into a lighthouse; people want to come to her, she’s important, she inspires through her appearance and words and craftwork. In medieval romances she gives gifts, write letters, sends messengers, and summons lovers; she plays chess, commissions ballads, composes music, commands knights. She is her household’s moral centre in a castle under siege. She is a castle unto herself, and the integrity of her body matters.
That can be so revolutionary to those of us stuck in our towers who fall prey to thinking: Nobody would want to visit; nobody would want to listen; nobody would want to stay.
Tropes don’t have fixed meanings. A trope you’ve always thought of as oppressive could be empowering for someone, somewhere, if written through the lens of inclusion, love, and liberation.
hello, am i allowed to ask what the whole jk rowling thing is about. i don't want to sound rude i just want to get that explained. thank you for answering and sorry to disturb you. have a wonderful week and stay healthy and safe please. ✨
Hello! I’ll do my best to outline the main points of the current controversy, as well as how this links to her behaviour in the past (although the examples I’m using are not exhaustive). But I would like to point out first that while I stand in solidarity with the trans community, I am not trans myself and I would suggest reading articles on this found online (pinknews is pretty good) as well as focusing on trans responses to the issue. I’m also summing up a lot of my views towards the end on why this is ‘bad’ so if I cover it here, I’m not responding to any other asks on the subject and I refuse to respond to all the anon hate I’ve been getting so don’t waste your breath.
So her previous TERF comments:
- in March 2018, JK Rowling liked a hateful tweet which referred to trans women as ‘men in dresses’. While her PR team labelled this a ‘middle-aged blunder’ of her clicking on the wrong thing, her many TERF activities after this would suggest that that is not the case.
- In December 2019 JK Rowling tweeted in protest of the removal of Maya Forstater, a TERF who was removed from her position due to her bigotted comments, after insisting that a person cannot change their biological sex.
- In May 2020, JK Rowling tweeted a response to a child’s drawing, accidentally copy-and-pasting a quote from an anti-trans article, which misgendered a trans-woman. This was particularly awful as it was, like I said, in response to a childs drawing. While she later deleted and apologised for the line having found its way into the response, she did not apologise for the misgendering within the tweet itself.
- And Yesterday, smack bang in the middle of pride month and the Black Lives Matter movement, JK Rowling tweeted this in response to a very netural non-aggressive phrase used within an article. The article used ‘people who menstrate’ which is inclusive of trans-men as not everyone who menstrates identifies as a ‘woman’ like JK Rowling wishes to claim.
She then went on to pit lesbians and gays against trans people, despite not ascribing to either label herself (a tactic often used by trolls to create in-fighting within a community), and claimed she was right to think this due to the opinion of her lesbian friend, using the lesbian community as a buffer for her views despite, again, not identifying as a lesbian.
She further implied TERF (trans-exclusionary-radical-feminist) to be a slur (it’ s not a slur - it’s a descriptor which is used to denote feminists who believe that trans women are not ‘real’ women and often claiming trans men are ‘confused’ lesbians and its an important descriptor because it helps to separate feminism that is for equality from feminism which relies on insisting there is a biological divide between men and women that often equates men as ‘evil’ and women as ‘trustworthy’ and ‘kind’ due to their motherly instincts) - and implied that the backlash against her from people who call her a TERF is somehow comparable to women being called ‘witches’ which, as we know, led to the mass murder of women during the 17th and 18th centuries.
Some further issues with her actions:
- she chose to do this during pride month, which should be about celebrating trans lives, as well as LGBT lives in general.
- she chose to do this instead of directing her millions of fans towards support in the Black Lives Matter movement. She clearly doesn’t have a problem getting political on her twitter, as this all shows, but she’s chosen NOW to focus on this instead, meaning that activists have to split their focus even more against the tide of TERFS this has brought out of the woodwork - the focus should not be on this! It should be on Black Lives Matter! Why did she decide to bring this up now of all times?
- she has a large following of young idols. This is dangerous, as when a person who many young people idolise says something like this it can radicalise those children against trans people or it can cause extreme self-hatred for those trans youth whose idol is now turning against them.
- she is a very clever woman. Her language is thus chosen very carefully to make her point seem reasonable on the surface unless taken to its logical conclusions. This means that her rhetoric is more likely to get people on side and spewing anti-trans bullshit than if she was just tweeting a simple ‘I hate trans people’. Notice how she claims she supports trans people, despite how her views are decried by so many trans men and women (and non-binary/gender fluid etc. people too)
- this is on the back of her other homophobic actions such as asking for credit for making a morally dubious man gay (even though its never mentioned in the books) and then making him in love with Literal Wizard Hitler, perpatrating the harmful sterotype that gay men are in some ways ‘evil’ or likely to love evil things.
Many people are claiming that this is fine and she’s just being ‘middle aged’ and not understanding properly but this is NOT like your grandma or your aunt getting something wrong. This is a woman who has claimed to do lots of research, who has come out on the side of TERFS and who has the ability to influence many to be transphobic. Transphobia is awful, look up trans depression rates, or trans suicide rates, and you’ll see just why it’s not okay for someone who has her power to be this hateful.
Once again, I’m not trans, please look at trans responses to this. And please do your own research. But I hope this clarifies why I am anti-Rowling and anti-TERF in general. If you are a TERF you can unfollow me now.
No. As an English major and a transgender person, no. We do not take this attitude.
Harry Potter is a culturally important work and JK Rowling wrote it.
So many culturally important works of literature were written by people with bad views by today’s and even their time’s standards. Shakespeare? Racist, sexist, islamophobic, xenophobic, anti-Semitic. But we don’t erase his name from those plays. Because if we try and claim that those plays were authorless it gives us an awfully convenient excuse to ignore all of the flaws within them and how we may or may not agree with those flaws on a subconscious level.
In the world of literary analysis these days the author is no longer dead. We don’t do that anymore. The author is a ghost hanging over your shoulder. You can interpret their work any way you want and they can have no say in it. But you as a reader must also acknowledge that their original intentions are there. Their personal history and the times they lived in are there.
JK Rowling wrote that series whether you like it or not. Whether that makes you comfortable or not. Harry Potter is one of the most culturally important book series of the last century and it was written by a transphobe. It was written by JK Rowling. Face up to it. Look it dead in the eye. Recognize its flaws and like it anyways if you still want to. But don’t. I repeat don’t. Do not claim that it is authorless. No work of literature is.
We’re holding JKR accountable like mature adults and embracing the reality though it hurts us to admit something we love was written by someone who continues to dig her grave but we must
