It never occurred to me to not be out and active. For one thing, I’ve been a political activist since I was in college, and I’ve volunteered for political campaigns since Nader in 2000. Beyond that, I identify as a trans woman. I have no desire to erase the “trans” part of who I am. I have no desire to fade into the crowd. I think it’s incredibly important to point out to society that yes, trans folks actually exist, and we kick ASS. That’s a big reason I’m so “out.” I also refuse to leave my fate and the fate of my trans sisters in the hands of others… So I will continue to agitate.
You’re really inspiring
That’s incredibly humbling. Thank you :)
I feel exactly the same way. I don’t hide who I am. I could, but I don’t want to. I have so much I can offer the world exactly as I am. I realize that not everyone has that option, and this is not a condemnation of those folks. It’s just a celebration of girls like us! Go us! :-D
Fuck yeah! #BaymaxKnuckles
That is really inspiring – and impressive. I kind of ended up wandering partially unintentionally, and partially intentionally into a closet. Have never lied (to my recollection), but also have been quite evasive with answers over the past few years…
I find it more odd because I used to run a trans-youth support group…so used to be very out-and-proud and then just kinda stopped when I handed the group over.
Been vaguely thinking about being more out, but haven’t really reached any conclusions yet. :)
So I walked into the bank and the friendly clerk, on my asking for a physical paper real actual thing type money order, rather than a digital one, looked confused and disorientated. She checked the calendar… no, it is 2015. She asked if I could possibly do it online.
Having explained that no, it says ‘Cheque or Money Order’ she said she couldn’t remember the cost and then between her and another person they found the form, blew off the dust, and discovered they couldn’t find – anywhere – the actual cost of doing it. They did know, however, that they have to send the form off and it gets processed elsewhere and then the money order is sent, by post, to me.
They suggested it might be around £15, but they weren’t sure because they most recently produced a money order about 5 years ago. They thought it probably took at least a couple of days.
…
I tried the post office. They can’t produce them at all anymore.
…
So it’ll be back to the bank on Monday then. Thankfully, they gave me the form because it’ll be a different branch I have to go to (my local little tiny one is closed on Mondays), and I have this feeling they’re going to be as lost as my local branch were.
In a moment (when I finish my tea) I’m going to go to the bank and attempt to obtain an $88 money order. It’ll go in this envelope [points] which contains an application to be a registered nurse in WA. It goes with the $350 I sent over [there] to a company to assess my nursing qualification for its US compatibility.
Then over here I’ve got an e-mail to my university saying ‘Yes, I know I’ve had two sodding transcripts, and each time they get more pricey, but could I get a third, please, to the US this time? And what will that cost me?’. And here, a letter to one of my other universities saying ‘please can I have a transcript sent to this place’.
Irritatingly, or not irritatingly, having gone through all the trouble of requesting a replacement A Level certificate, when I’ve got into the application process proper it says ‘Requirement Waived’. So I didn’t have to wait a month, this could all have been in progress already. Grr.
In less terrifying activities, I planted three tomato plants, weeded the garden some, and put down more mulch and more bark chip. I need, unsurprisingly, more bark chip and more mulch. Oh, and some more plants. There’s some areas that are looking pretty sparse. Although I’m thinking of yanking out the failed attempt at an alpine plant area, transplanting them, and putting the pond in there. Oh and I attached the faux-trim which is making up the edge of the kitchen doorframe where they (in 1936) cut the edge off the lambs tongue trim to make the built-in cupboard (that we removed) fit. Then I filled the heck out of the edge where it joins the trim. Oh, and I changed the filter in the Dyson (despite the previous owner GLUEING it in (seriously, WTF?!)).
the stereotype that women talk more than men is infinitely amusing to me because men are literally incapable of shutting the fuck up
i hope this post gets popular enough that i hurt a man’s feelings
It’s not a stereotype it’s a proven fact you femanazi piece of shit.
lmao there it is
You wanna talk proven facts? This shit’s been done, son: researcher Dale Spencer in Australia used audio and video tape to independently evaluate who talked the most in mixed-gender university classroom discussions. Regardless of the gender ratio of the students, whether the instructor was deliberately trying to encourage female participation or not, men always talked more—whether the metric was minutes of talking or number of words spoken.
Moreover, men literally have no clue how much they talk. When Spencer asked students to evaluate their perception of who talked more in a given discussion, women were pretty accurate; but men perceived the discussion as being “equal” when women talked only 15% of the time, and the discussion as being dominated by women if they talked only 30% of the time.
Spencer’s conclusion, if I may parahprase: you only think we talk too much because you’d rather we were silent.
Cable bundling is the system that until now has provided the economic
subsidies for many expensive, high-quality, but ultimately
niche-oriented shows. Unbundling AMC and HBO from ESPN and QVC – indeed,
unbundling Game of Thrones from Olive Kitteridge –
and allowing audiences to pick and choose in a kind of pay-as-you-go
system would inevitably decrease the number and variety of options
available. In a strictly à la carte system, the fees charged to
consumers for watching a show would have to exceed the budget for
production, marketing and distribution of the show itself in every case,
without exception, on a show-by-show basis. Every show on television,
or the internet, no matter how adventurous or expensive, would be
subject to this cutthroat, all-or-nothing popularity contest. Risks
would therefore become much harder to take. […]
And this is assuming that anyone is willing to pay for the shows they
watch at all. As internet pioneer turned techo-skeptic Jaron Lanier
starkly puts it in his 2010 screed You Are Not a Gadget, “Once
file sharing shrinks Hollywood as it is now shrinking the music
companies, the option of selling a script for enough money to make a
living will be gone.” Lanier’s warning may seem hyperbolic, but
unrestricted file sharing is surely what undermined the music industry,
and it’s what’s hurting the world of journalism, too. In a sense, the
internet caused the unbundling of both the music album and the print
newspaper — and in doing so, severely damaged both industries. The
trouble comes down to simple economics of supply and demand in the
digital age. When infinite copies of a work of art can be made and
distributed globally in an instant, supply is limitless, and the value
of an individual copy gets pushed down to zero. But of course, the
original cost of creating a work of art in the first place, for the
creator, does not change a bit. Writers still need to eat, pay rent, and
feed their families. They just can’t necessarily rely on profits from
their actual work to compensate them for that endeavor. This is how a
profession gets demonetized. This is how a job — a living — gets reduced
to a hobby.
The music industry was going to shrink anyway and shot itself in the foot besides. This has already been roundly dismissed, boring boring boring. And yeah artists need to eat but SHOCKINGLY SO DO CONSUMERS AND WE ARE BEING SQUEEZED FROM EVERY DIRECTION OF COURSE WE ARE LEERY OF PAYING FOR SHIT.
Here’s a solution: full communism now. Here’s another solution: old media should pull its head out of its ass, or at least have the decency to finally suffocate in there.
Don’t sell me a shitty situation and tell me it’s the only alternative. Get creative. Isn’t that what capitalists are supposed to do? Be entrepreneurs? And if they can’t do that, again, maybe it’s time we recognized that the problem isn’t the consumer, it’s capitalism. Capitalism is the enemy of art, not people who are just trying to fucking survive.
I just gave the following art direction for the endpapers on the new Flamingo Rampant kids books coming out next month:
“Make the spot where the kid writes their name hella fancy, in case they are writing their new name there for the very first time.”
Because it’s so easy for me to imagine this moment. To imagine a kid getting these books after some very difficult conversations and some not-so-great visits to the washroom at school and then finally the parent comes home from an event or a conference with this blue cotton backpack with a bright pink design on it – a girl pirate and a boy merman and a happy kid with a sword but also riding a shark – and in this bag is a set of six books that contain a whole world of peaceful, joyful kids like that kid. Or who would love kids like that kid. And when it’s time for the kid to write their name in their brand-new books, maybe for the first time they pen in a name that has previously only been known in their secret heart – a name that brightens every time it’s used, like blood turns red when it meets the air.
So if we’re bothering to make a space for This Book Belongs To at all, let’s make it so when that kid looks down at their name, bright and tender and outside at last, they see a reflection of how precious it is.
