Ahmed Mohamed, a 14-year-old Muslim student was arrested at his high school in Irving, Texas, after bringing a homemade clock to class, which school officials mistook for a bomb. Mohamed showed his engineering teacher first, but when the alarmed went off later in the day, that’s when the trouble started.
A couple people reblogged my brief complaint about neurotypical feminism yesterday to say “yes, someone finally described the thing” and a couple other people reblogged it to say “huh, what?” so I thought I’d expand on the thing.
Some people say “#yesallwomen experience street harassment and fear of men!” A woman says “as a visibly disabled autistic person, I’m desexualized and treated like a genderless unperson. and, no, I don’t experience street harassment and I’m not hit on.” Another woman says “as someone who was abused by women, I feel much more comfortable around men than around women. Women scare me. Men don’t.” They are ignored, or yelled at for derailing.
Making fun of men for dressing badly, struggling with hygiene and being socially awkward is okay, even though disabled women who struggle with the same things keep on saying “when you joke that way about disabled men, I feel unsafe.”
An autistic woman talks about how her disability gives her some strengths in her field and a perspective on it that isn’t represented in sexism in STEM conversations. She argues that listening to autistic women in tech might make us better at fixing the gender gap. A bunch of people explain to her that she is femmephobic and has internalized misogyny and just wants to say “I’ve got mine, so screw you”.
I feel like these have a thing in common. That thing is winning political points with the suggestion that your opponents are disabled, as if that’s good for women. That thing is dismissal, erasure and contempt directed at any women whose experiences don’t fit the narratives, experiences that are specifically often not shared by disabled and non-NT women. That thing is an insistence that the harms to disabled and non-NT people (through advocacy that erases and dismisses them) is negligible compared to the harms done by misogyny to abled NT women, and that complaining about this is therefore itself a form of misogyny. That thing is the repeated insistence that asking feminists to accommodate disabled people and especially people with anxiety or scrupulosity disorders is an unfair and sexist demand for emotional labor.
If the failure of NT feminism is ignoring anyone whose narrative doesn’t fit, we’d fail just as badly in the opposite direction if we generalized about all disabled and non-NT people. And I’m sure there are some who are reading this post and going “no, haven’t noticed that”, and their experiences are real and valid too. But there are quite a few disabled and non-NT people whose experience of sexism is strongly shaped by their neurotype. And many are not comfortable in a space where “haha does your mom do your laundry” and “don’t use your crippling social anxiety as an excuse, it’s not that bad” are common. Or where womanhood is defined and fought for as a collection of experiences that we don’t share.
I work with people who have HIV as a part of my job. If you have HIV please remember:
HIV can be controlled by medications for a super long time (think 30 years+). It is more like getting a diabetes diagnosis than a death sentence.
No matter how your infection happened you deserve to live and have a happy life.
By federal law in the United States there is tons of resources to help you get medication for FREE.
You can find partners who will accept you and love you.
You can have children who are born HIV-. If a child is born in a first world county with medical care the likelyhood of transmission is rediculously low.
On medication your likelyhood of infecting others decreases significantly depending on your viral load.
PEP and PrEP are exciting things to look into to be able to have unprotected sex and prevent transmission.
HIV does not have to be central to your identity.
People who take their medication like prescribed can actually have as few as 2 doctor appointments a year for their condition !
Don’t let stigma, fear and lack of education get you down! You are a wonderful person and can achieve wonderful things. Don’t give up.
And if you don’t know your status please get tested. Please!
HIV can be controlled by medications for a super long time (think 30 years+). It is more like getting a diabetes diagnosis than a death sentence.
I just… I can’t get over this. I mean, it’s true, at least in the US and nations with affordable, available healthcare, but I haven’t thought about it before like that, and…
I remember, as a kid, how many people we lost. I personally worked on at least 20 squares on the Quilt. My pastor’s brother died. My best friend’s uncle died. Two people from church. One from Dad’s work. People in the neighborhood.
I remember, vividly, when it was a terrifying death sentence. When it was stigmatized and kids were getting thrown out of school and people were getting thrown out of housing. I remember the garbage that those shitheads in the White House in the 80s threw at us, I remember the cover-ups and the suppression.
We could have gotten here so much sooner, and so many fewer people could have died.
But we’re here. In thirty years, we have gone from ‘unconquerable epidemic of suffering and inevitable death’ to ‘it’s like diabetes or another treatable condition’, and in the public eye we’ve gone from ‘thing that kills bad people like the queers and the drug users’ to ‘you are normal and fine’.
Jesus fucking Christ.. Thank you, everyone who’s worked on this over the past decades. Thank you.
Reblogging because this is news to me, and I suspect many others of my generation. I’m 32.
I also worked around HIV prevention and these are the most important things when talking about HIV these days!1
We discuss this a lot in our advocacy work, but I know from experience people still know very little about HIV. And I think the most necessary thing at the moment is destigmatization and mainstreaming of these issues.
I received a call from my sons’ school in March telling me that my oldest needed to be picked up early. He had been given a one-day suspension because he had thrown a chair. He did not hit anyone, but he could have, the school officials told me.
JJ was 4 at the time.
I agreed his behavior was inappropriate, but I was shocked that it resulted in a suspension.
For weeks, it seemed as if JJ was on the chopping block. He was suspended two more times, once for throwing another chair and then for spitting on a student who was bothering him at breakfast. Again, these are behaviors I found inappropriate, but I did not agree with suspension.
Still, I kept quiet. I knew my history. I was the bad preschooler.
I was expelled from preschool and went on to serve more suspensions than I can remember. But I do remember my teachers’ disparaging words. I remember being told I was bad and believing it. I remember just how long it took me to believe anything else about myself.
And even still, when my children were born, I promised myself that I would not let my negative school experiences affect them. I believed my experience was isolated. I searched for excuses. Maybe I was just a bad kid. Maybe it had something to do with my father’s incarceration, which forced my mother to raise me and my brothers alone.
So I punished JJ at home and ignored my concerns. Then, two months later, I was called to pick up my 3-year-old son, Joah. Joah had hit a staff member on the arm. After that incident, they deemed him a “danger to the staff.” Joah was suspended a total of five times. In 2014, my children have received eight suspensions.
Just like before, I tried to find excuses. I looked at myself. What was I doing wrong? My children are living a comfortable life. My husband is an amazing father to JJ and Joah. At home, they have given us very few problems; the same goes for time with babysitters.
I blamed myself, my past. And I would have continued to blame myself had I not taken the boys to a birthday party for one of JJ’s classmates. At the party, the mothers congregated to talk about everyday parenting things, including preschool. As we talked, I admitted that JJ had been suspended three times. All of the mothers were shocked at the news.
“JJ?” one mother asked.
“My son threw something at a kid on purpose and the kid had to be rushed to the hospital,” another parent said. “All I got was a phone call.”
One after another, white mothers confessed the trouble their children had gotten into. Some of the behavior was similar to JJ’s; some was much worse.
Most startling: None of their children had been suspended.
Tunette Powell’s 3-year-old son, Joah, has been suspended from school five times. (credit: Tunette Powell) Tunette Powell’s 3-year-old son, Joah, has been suspended from school five times. (Tunette Powell) After that party, I read a study reflecting everything I was living.
Black children represent 18 percent of preschool enrollment but make up 48 percent of preschool children receiving more than one out-of-school suspension, according to the study released by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in March.
I immediately thought back to my own childhood. I thought back to the humiliating labels that greeted me before I could read. I thought back to the number of black friends and family members who also were suspended and expelled. I thought about my family and friends who had not overcome the detrimental effects of being suspended in preschool. I did not want that for JJ and Joah. I did not want it for any child.
But the next step was the hardest. At news of all of this, friends and relatives suggested that I pull my children out of the preschool program and move them into another. At first, I considered that. That move may have changed my kids’ circumstances, but it would not have solved the problem. All across this country, black children are being suspended in preschool.
We can no longer put a Band-Aid on our nation’s preschool-to-prison pipeline, which pushes children out of the education system and criminalizes relatively minor offenses. Moving my boys to another school would have provided a stopgap solution. It may have solved my problem, but it would not have solved the problem.
The problem is not that we have a bunch of racist teachers and administrators. I believe most educators want to help all children. But many aren’t aware of the biases and prejudices that they, like all of us, harbor, and our current system offers very little diversity training to preschool staff.
A recent study published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that the subjects — mostly white, female undergraduates — viewed black boys as older and less innocent than their white peers. When photos of children were paired with descriptions of crimes, the subjects judged the black children to be more culpable for their actions than their white or Latino counterparts and estimated that they were an average of 4.5 years older than they actually were.
Authority figures strip black boys of their innocence at younger ages than white children. Diversity training for teachers and administrators would raise their awareness of how subconscious prejudices can drive racial discrepancies in disciplinary action.
ok but there were literally white cis gay and bi men at stonewall?
why are y’all insisting on erasing gay and bi men from their own history some of y’all are blatantly fucking homophobic but dw you put white in front of it as if that makes it any better.
This tweet goes way too far. I am 100% behind calling out black and trans erasure in our movement (and in general). Erasing the very people that started this is disgusting and abhorrent. The people who contribute to this erasure need to be pointed out and criticized. They need to know that we won’t stand for taking people out of our history.
But white cis men participated in the riots, too. They were also getting attacked and killed. They were victims of violence and hate and they fought along side Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and Storme DeLarverie. I find it awful that anyone would compare victims of homophobia and transphobia with their aggressors.
Hereare a fewfirsthand accounts of Stonewall participants, here and here is Sylvia Rivera describing the demographics of the Stonewall, here is a documentary on Marsha P Johnson, and here is a quick reminder that condoning erasure and revisionist history is damaging. It doesn’t matter if you think cis gay men are so privileged and homonormative they might as well be straight (and that’s another post’s worth of issues right there). Yes, they are afforded many privileges that LGBT POC are not, but this doesn’t negate their presence at Stonewall.
They weren’t the saviors the Stonewall film
seems to be saying they are, and the erasure and whitewashing being perpetuated by the movie is dishonest and harmful, but claiming they had no place there isn’t accurate either.
this is what happens when the need to score points outstrips the need to elevate the marginalized
“I was born into the brick kilns. I started working at the age of 12. The work never ended. We’re expected to make 1,000 bricks per day. We work from 5 AM to dusk. I tried to organize the workers recently to demand fair wages. We held meetings at night, but one of the workers informed on us. The owners called me to the office and beat me. They made the other workers join in. Then they took off all my clothes and tied me to a tree. I begged them not to do it. They left me there for hours. I tried to escape at night. I padlocked my family in the house and I ran into the fields. I came straight to Fatima. Before we could return for my family, the police had helped the owners break into my house. And my daughters were paraded naked in the streets.”
(4 of 7)
(Lahore, Pakistan)
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This is the fourth post in a series on Syeda Ghulam Fatima. Known to her admirers as Pakistan’s Harriet Tubman, Fatima has worked tirelessly to eradicate bonded labor—one of the last remaining forms of modern slavery. This man is one of millions of bonded laborers in Pakistan, and one of the tens of thousands who has turned directly to Fatima to help him escape the violence and cruelty of the owners. Fatima has been electrocuted, shot, and repeatedly beaten for her activism. Despite her outsized impact, she operates on a very small budget. So we are raising money to help her in her mission.
Today is the last day of the fundraiser we are holding for Fatima’s organization, The Bonded Labour Liberation Front. We have raised nearly $250,000 so far. Costs are low in Pakistan, so this sort of money can be leveraged many times over. We are not just increasing Fatima’s abilities to help free people from bondage. We are MULTIPLYING those abilities. Nearly 8,000 people have contributed so far. I encourage everyone to read the previous posts, and consider being counted in our effort to aid Fatima’s fight against modern slavery: http://bit.ly/1N9W3Ts
Since the trailer of the atrocious Stonewall movie was released, people are rightfully upset that it white-washes and erases the trans women and lesbian who started the Stonewall Riots. Posts are going around reminding us of these women, but usually only mentioned one or two, which I find a little a-historical. We should know who all these women are as they each played a significant role in what happened in June of 1969.
Stormé DeLarverie (December 24, 1920 – May 24, 2014)
Stormé was a biracial butch lesbian, drag king and considered the “Rosa Parks of the Gay Community”. When the police raided the Stonewall Inn, she was one of the women arrested and clubbed on the head by the police. She is credited with yelling
“Why don’t you guys do something?” which sparked the bystanders into action. (x) In her own words:
”[The officer] then yelled, ‘I said, move along, faggot.’ I think he thought I was a boy. When I refused, he raised his nightstick and clubbed me in the face.” It was then that the crowd surged and started attacking the police with whatever they could find, she said.
I asked my last question hesitantly. “Have you heard of the Stonewall Lesbian? The woman who was clubbed outside the bar but was never identified?” DeLarverie nodded, rubbing her chin in the place where she received 14 stitches after the beating. “Yes,” she said quietly. “They were talking about me.”
And then, almost as an afterthought, I asked, “Why did you never come forward to take credit for what you did?”
She thought for a couple of seconds before she answered, “Because it was never anybody’s business.” Stormé DeLarverie(source)
Marsha P. Johnson (June 27, 1944 – July 6, 1992)
Marsha “Pay it No Mind” Johnson was a black trans woman, drag queen and LGBT activist. She, along with Sylvia Rivera, co-founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) and is credited as being the first to fight back at Stonewall Inn. (x)
“This was started by the street queens of that era, which I was part of, Marsha P. Johnson, and many others that are not here" Sylvia Rivera (Source)
Sylvia Rae Rivera (July 2, 1951 – February 19, 2002)
Sylvia was a Latina trans woman, drag queen and LGBT activist. As mentioned above she co-founded STAR with Marsha P Johnson, as well as a founding member of the
“You’ve been treating us like shit all these years? Uh-uh. Now it’s our turn!… It was one of the greatest moments in my life.
“ Sylvia Rivera (Source)
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (October 1940)
Also known as Miss Major, is a black trans woman and community leader for transgender rights with a focus on women of color. Miss Major was a leader in the riots who was struck by police and arrested. While in custody an officer broke her jaw. (x) A documentary called Major! is in the works to portray Miss Major’s role in the transgender activist community. (x) (I hope people watch this instead of Stonewall).
Many more people were involved in the riots, but one thing is clear, it was not started by cis white men, it was by these 4 women of color. Don’t let men take away our history.
