trending on Twitter right now. Lots of Russians are coming out. Many of them are under 18, and they give zero fucks about stupid homophobic laws. Those brave teens give me so much hope. Please be safe, and never lose your heart!
Today, 1 month later, the top tag in the country is #МЫЗАЛГБТ (#WESUPPORTLGBT)
Keep it up, compatriots, that’s a good thing you’re doing.
January 2016: there’s another surge of LGBTQ-themed posts on twitter, and the tag is trending nationwide again.
That might be related to the upcoming Duma vote :( let’s keep it going! Every ounce of support helps!
Additionally, I’m sure there are other avenues to offer aid, but the one I know off the top of my head is to purchase the song Uprising of Love by Melissa Etheridge, getting it’s title from the LGBTQ+ rights movement of same name; proceeds go towards those negatively affected by the Duma legislation and homophobic rhetoric being spread. The message of the song is powerful, as is the aid your purchase provides.
Everyone, please sign it. Please help us stopping this awful law that would actually criminalize being openly LGBTQ in Russia!
Good news: Duma has rejected the draft law!
The petition above has become the largest and most successful among the LGBTQ rights petitions. Thank you for helping us win this one!
However, the bigger fight is far from over, as the censorship established by homophobes in power still exists, and even though being LGBTQ is not a crime, it is still pretty dangerous to publicly come out or even show support for LGBTQ in Russia.
April 2016: “LGBT follows Russia” is the top Russian tag trending on Twitter, and the movement seems even bigger this time!
May 17th and 18th: LGBT-themed Russian tags trend at the very top nationwide for 50 hours non-stop. The record is broken. It even gets into news on other social networks.
June 3rd: #LoveIsLove and #Pride2016 trend as №1 and №2 in Russia even though we cannot legally have our own Pride parades (yet).
Wow, you guys
The year is 2016
Pride parade DID happen in St. Petersburg on the Palace square this summer. No arrests, everything went okay (probably because there were foreigners as well, and the Palace square is a popular tourist location)
YABLOKO, a Russian social liberal party, has officially included LGBTQ rights in their election promises
The infamous homophobic law was repealed in St. Pretersburg, thanks to YABLOKO
An openly gay man and LGBTQ rights activist is running for the State Duma
13th September 2016: there was a protest in St. Petersburg near the barbershop that had decided to deny its services for gay folks. The protest went perfectly well, although the barbershop still hasn’t changed its policy.
Cool, unfortunately these things are not really spread in mainstream media that’s why a lot of people don’t hear about these things but overall this and ha fact that these things were not followed by exec more pressure gives me hope that we are moving in a positive direction.
I hate that the only effective response I can give to “boys are shit” is “we’ll I’m not a boy.” I feel like I am selling out the boy in baseball pajamas that sat with me on the bed while I tried to figure out which one I was supposed to be, and the boys who I have met and loved from inside my boy suit—who believed they were talking to a boy. I feel like I am burning the history of the naked body that sits on the floor of my shower. The body that went to prom in a boxy tuxedo and coveted the gowns.
Because I am not a boy, but I am a woman who had a boyhood. I was, and am, made to live as a boy and I cannot suspend the perspective that gave me and join in when it’s time to fluster one of those clueless fuckers into anger by calling him a fuckboi and then tell him his anger proves he’s a fuckboi, or to humiliate one with an OKCupid screenshot because we’ve willfully conflated the clumsy ones with the threatening ones so we can grab those solidarity faves. It’s fucked up. It has metastasized.
Several transwomen have told me, privately, they they are uncomfortable with these things, but are afraid that speaking up about it would cause ciswomen to like and trust them less. “I play along,” one of them told me, “because in the queer community the only people who defend cisboys are cisboys. I don’t want to give up finally being read as a girl.”
Have you noticed, when a product is marketed in an unnecessarily gendered way, that the blame shifts depending on the gender? That a pink pen made “for women” is (and this is, of course, true) the work idiotic cynical marketing people trying insultingly to pander to what they imagine women want? But when they make yogurt “for men” it is suddenly about how hilarious and fragile masculinity is — how men can’t eat yogurt unless their poor widdle bwains can be sure it doesn’t make them gay? #MasculinitySoFragile is aimed, with smug malice, at men—not marketers.
This conclusion—widley shared—is a product of insulated discourse. I am not saying “open the floodgates, let in the shitty male trolls!” I am pleading to the discoursers: consider that this insulation has effects and try to mitigate them, if your priority really is finding truth amid a muck of concealed patriarchal lies. Check to see if maybe you are saying things and reproducing things mostly because it sounds good and feels good and nobody is challenging them.
“WE ARE SICK AND TIRED OF THE KILLINGS OF YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN IN OUR COMMUNITIES.
IT IS UP TO US TO TAKE A STAND AND DEMAND THAT THEY ‘STOP KILLING US.’
WE DON’T NEED SYMPATHY. WE NEED EVERYONE TO RESPECT OUR LIVES.
WE’RE GOING TO STAND UP AS A COMMUNITY AND FIGHT AGAINST ANYONE WHO
BELIEVES THAT MURDER OR ANY VIOLENT ACTION BY THOSE WHO ARE SWORN TO
PROTECT US SHOULD CONSISTENTLY GO UNPUNISHED.
THESE ROBBERIES
OF LIVES MAKE US FEEL HELPLESS AND HOPELESS BUT WE HAVE TO BELIEVE THAT
WE ARE FIGHTING FOR THE RIGHTS OF THE NEXT GENERATION, FOR THE NEXT
YOUNG MEN AND WOMEN WHO BELIEVE IN GOOD.
THIS IS A HUMAN
FIGHT. NO MATTER YOUR RACE, GENDER, OR SEXUAL ORIENTATION. THIS IS A
FIGHT FOR ANYONE WHO FEELS MARGINALIZED, WHO IS STRUGGLING FOR FREEDOM
OR HUMAN RIGHTS.
THIS IS NOT A PLEA TO ALL POLICE OFFICERS
BUT TOWARD ANY HUMAN BEING WHO FAILS TO VALUE LIFE. THE WAR ON PEOPLE OF
COLOR AND ALL MINORITIES NEEDS TO BE OVER.
FEAR IS NOT AN EXCUSE. HATE WILL NOT WIN.
WE ALL HAVE THE POWER TO CHANNEL OUR ANGER AND FRUSTRATION INTO
ACTION. WE MUST USE OUR VOICE TO CONTACT THE POLITICIANS AND LEGISLATORS
IN OUR DISTRICTS AND DEMAND SOCIAL AND JUDICIAL CHANGES.
WHILE WE PRAY FOR THE FAMILIES OF ALTON STERLING AND PHILANDO CASTILE,
WE WILL ALSO PRAY FOR AN END TO THIS PLAGUE OF INJUSTICE IN OUR
COMMUNITIES.
CLICK IN TO CONTACT THE POLITICIANS AND LEGISLATORS IN YOUR AREA. YOUR VOICE WILL BE HEARD.”
I’ll make you all a deal. This will be one of the last posts that I make on the matter. But you all need to signal boost this. This one needs to be heard by everyone.
–
I’m at a really good place in my life right now. I just turned 22. I just finished my fourth year of college with a 3.7 GPA, I moved into my first apartment, I’m doing an awesome internship, I’m doing a ton of advocacy work. I’m genuinely happy.
I’m at a really great place.
I wasn’t always.
I’ve been disabled all my life but about ten years ago, I walked into an operating room and came out in a wheelchair. (Well, technically I came out on a stretcher, but you get the point.)
And it took me a while to realize that my life was completely different. In fact, it wasn’t until about three years later, when I was about fifteen, that I really realized it. I don’t know if I was in shock all that time, if I was numb, if the medications that I was on limited any conscious thought, let alone emotion. But it was around the age of fifteen that everything came crashing down and I fell apart. I became extremely depressed. And let me tell you, no matter how hard you try, you never forget that feeling. It’s one of the worst feelings in the world. Depression is like being in a room where everything is pitch black. And people are screaming at you to turn on the light switch, but you can’t find it, you can’t see it, even though everyone else seems to know exactly where it is, you’re completely lost in this dark room with no way out. Depression is horrible. I would never wish it on my worst enemy. Even now, there are days when I struggle, though those days are nowhere as bad as the weeks, months, that I battled depression as a teenager. As a fifteen-year-old, too weak to put up a fight.
Now, I should mention that I never tried anything.
But believe me when I say that I know what it’s like to want to.
And believe me when I say that if you built a time machine, if you took Jojo Moyes’ infamous book, if you sent it back to 2009, and if fifteen-year-old me had read it…
I probably wouldn’t be here right now.
I’d be dead.
I would have lost my battle.
Because I would have picked up a book wherein the main character kills themselves because they think that their life isn’t worth living now that they’re disabled.
And I would have related all too well, and I would have done something that’s genuinely terrifying to think about. I know I would have. I was not in a good place at that time, I was not strong, and while I did survive, it wouldn’t have taken much for the scales to tip in the other direction.
And I keep going into the Me Before You tags on different websites and I keep seeing teenagers who are in the same place that I once was, who are saying that they were sobbing in the movie theaters because they didn’t expect the ending and they genuinely don’t know what to do.
I would have been one of those teenagers.
I dodged a bullet.
Literally.
And I know that the author probably didn’t mean for any of this to happen, she didn’t expect the huge backlash from the disabled community, she didn’t expect a very tired college student to be revealing something very personal at 1:06 AM.
She just wanted to tell a story.
I can respect that.
I read an interview a few days ago where she talked about how she had seen a few debates over assisted suicide and she felt compelled to write a story, to give a perspective, to give a voice.
And whether she meant to or not, that voice is a single mantra:
“It’s okay to die.”
And I keep seeing people defend the book, defend the author, defend that voice, by saying that it’s just one perspective, it’s just one voice.
But it’s not.
It’s not okay.
And it’s not just one voice.
You see, we didn’t need Jojo Moyes to be that voice. She thinks we did. But we didn’t.
We hear that voice every single day.
We hear that voice every single day.
Every single day.
We hear people talking about how it’s okay for the disabled to die.
Every. Single. Day.
(Note: I was actually going to make this a video but at this point, I started crying and couldn’t finish, so I’m typing it all out instead.)
And we hear our own inner voice, whispering to us at night, urging us that it’s okay to die.
We hear the voices. We hear them. We hear them every single day. The voices that say that it’s okay to die.
We hear them.
I heard them when I was fifteen. I heard them loud and clear. And I believed them. And had I read Me Before You, it would have been the voice to break the camel’s back. It would have been the voice that I listened to.
This book would have killed me.
This book is going to end up killing someone else.
And I don’t think Jojo Moyes understands, I don’t think that the abled community understands, I think they have the privilege of not understanding just how loud that voice can be and how damaging that voice can be. They don’t hear those voices every day.
But we do.
Whether we want to or not.
And you know what?
For the amount of people who say, “It’s okay to die.” there are very few people out there who say, “It’s okay to live.”
They’re the voices that we need to hear. They’re the voices that are so few and far between.
And I’m here tonight to try to be one of those voices.
For those of you who are constantly hearing the various voices that are telling you that it’s okay to die, please, please know that those voices are lying to you. I know that it’s hard. I know what it’s like to be in that dark room. I also know what it’s like to open the door and to escape.
And I know there are others that have escaped as well. And now, we have to help the others who haven’t. We have to help the others who keep hearing these voices. We have to put an end to them.
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.
Attractions Magazine with Sharon Mahoney, Ronald Scagliola and Bradley Kaplan
“Universal team members and friends raise wands in memory of team members Luis Vielma and Xavier Serrano, who were killed in the Orlando nightclub attacks. #orlandounited #oneorlando”
French Jews are experiencing the most difficult situation they have encountered since the end of World War II, the newly-elected president of France’s umbrella of Jewish communities said.
Francis Kalifat, 64, said Sunday that his first priority as president of CRIF is to fight against the anti-Semitism that he said was responsible for the situation he described.
“The fight against anti-Semitism is our main cause because French Jews are in the most difficult situation they have experience since World War II,” Kalifat said during an interview with Radio J shortly after his unanimous election to succeed Roger Cukierman as president.
Kalifat, who was born in Algeria and is the first Sephardic Jew to hold the position since CRIF’s establishment in 1944, was the only candidate running this election.
His presidency, which will become effective next month, comes at a time of record emigration by Jews from France, partly because of anti-Semitic violence that included hundreds of anti-Semitic incidents annually in recent years, and dozens of physical assaults. Since 2012, attacks on Jewish targets by French Islamists in France and Belgium claimed the lives of 12 people. Last year, roughly 8,000 French Jews left for Israel — the highest number on record for any year, which made France for the second year straight Israel’s largest provider of newcomers.
hey tumblr allow me to drop some knowledge on you about this subject
There are two drugs that suppress puberty: leuprolide and histrelin. If your insurance does not cover these – and there is about a 50% chance that they won’t – you have options.
The thing is, this shit is expensive. Leuprolide (brand name Lupron) is a shot that you can take either monthly or every three months. If you’re buying it out of pocket, monthly it costs about $1200. So over the course of the year that is going to cost you about 14 grand. Holy shit.
Histrelin (brand name Supprelin LA) is a once yearly implant that goes under the skin of your arm. It costs anywhere between $15000 and $18000 depending on your pharmacy. Holy fucking crap.
BUT! There is an alternative. See, Supprelin LA was specifically designed to suppress puberty in children. Histrelin *also* comes in an implant called Vantas. It’s indicated by the FDA for treating cancer in adults (suppressing testosterone and estrogens is very important for some cancers) but it is the EXACT SAME DRUG.
The Vantas implant is available from Walgreens Specialty Pharmacy in Oregon for $3200. I know that that’s still pricy, but compared to the alternatives, it is a godsend. That’s $3200 for an entire year – and often longer – of hormone suppression therapy. (There’s no consensus on how long exactly the implants last. We’ve seen them last up to 18 months.) The procedure to put it in is simple. No general anesthesia, only local. It can be done at the endocrinologist’s office and takes about 20 minutes. I’ve assisted with over a hundred of these.
I’m not a shill, I don’t work for the company that makes Vantas. But I’m posting this because the vast majority of doctors don’t know about this drug. It was designed for adults and is marketed for adults. But it is the exact same drug they use for children and at a fraction of the cost.
So there you have it, tumblr. Signal boost this shit. Help some kids with crappy insurance afford their treatment.
(credentials – I work at the office of a pediatric endocrinologst – one of only two in the entire state of Arizona that does hormone suppression therapy for transgender children. I’m happy to answer questions if anybody has any.)
