The Trans Pride Centre – the UK’s only trans-focused center run by trans people – will have to close its doors for good unless it raises £27,500 to keep it open to provide vital support services for the trans and non-binary community.
I saw few posts going around about superwholock being the peak queer baiting and how finally we have shows with complex queer characters and storylines… why do you have to put doctor who with the other two?
Did this mean nothing
This breaks my heart constantly. Doctor Who did Jack and the Doctor/Jack kiss only two years after Section 28 was repealed, when same-sex marriage was still illegal and kids called each other “gay” as an insult in the playground.
A really important part of queer television history and it just feels like it’s gone.
This is extremely important, y’all. They’re trying to Hyde Amendment trans care for people of all ages.
Medicaid and Medicare coverage would go away, no matter what state you are in. ACA plan coverage would go away. Hospitals would fully just have to stop offering trans care, full stop, or lose their federal funding.
I know we hate the phone but we absolutely can’t sleep on this. If you have a Democrat rep, you absolutely have to tell them to hold the line against this.
Please do not let this pass silently. Please call your Representatives and Senators, yes call them and leave a message. This cannot be tolerated, this will kill so many people who are just trying to live our lives.
Hey y’all, I’d appreciate anyone from the UK signing this petition to allow trans/nonbinary kids to stay closeted from their parents if they’re out at school. It’s obviously very important that children be able to keep potentially dangerous information about their identity away from their parents, and explore it safely in a school environment.
If it reaches 10k votes the government must respond, and 100k means they need to debate it, but any votes are good for raising awareness and profile.
If you’re not from the UK please share this so others see it
There’s a reason the state starts by going after the people you refuse to respect
Fuckin iowa jesus christ. And fucking republicans in general
Please notice that the wording they use has shifted from “marriage between one man and one woman” to “marriage between one male and one female”. This is not a coincidence. GCs and terfs have no excuse to not see the blood on their hands.
Wayne was gay. It was obvious. He was unable to stay in the closet even if he wanted to. To make matters worse, he was also Black. From a bullying standpoint, that was not a great combo. Both Black and white students made fun of him relentlessly. He was ostracized from the only community that may have given him protection. Only us theater kids stuck up for him, but not to significant effect.
Wayne was bullied so much that at one point he finally snapped and attacked his bullies with a lunch tray. I was actually seated in perfect line of sight and just sat there chewing my soggy fries in stunned silence. It didn’t even seem real as I was witnessing it. The image of him wailing on his main bully as the food on his tray flew off is permanently logged into my long term memory.
The bully he attacked had blood all over his face and went straight to the nurse. Other than superficial cuts, he was not injured.
Before the attack, Wayne went to teachers for help. He went to guidance counselors for help. He went to the principals for help.
He did all of the things you were supposed to do. No one helped him. They wagged a finger at the bullies and warned them to stop.
Wayne’s lunch tray melee was the only thing that worked. His bullies stayed far away from him. But a week later Wayne was expelled and the bullies were given no punishment.
So… no.
No one in my school talked about being trans.
Because the only way to survive being openly queer was to bash people with a lunch tray.
Graduated high school in 1990. There was one guy in my class who was bullied and called gay because… he liked wearing eyeliner. That’s it. he had a girlfriend. He’s still, afaik, straight and cis. But he wore one item of makeup and had a fashion sense and that was enough. I left my small town and went to college at an extremely liberal private college and immediately met trans and gay and bisexual and lesbian people and started considering my own identity, which it had not been safe to do AT ALL in high school.
And later learned that a number of people I’d known in high school were queer. By later, I mean 20 years later when we all found each other on facebook.
Kids started calling me a “lesbo” on the playground and beating me up for it while I was in elementary school. I became “boy crazy” as a form of self defense. If I was a slut, at least I wasn’t a dyke.
It was a joke in my family that my youngest sibling hated dresses, which of course were mandatory for “girls.” Ha ha, it’s funny, ha ha. Because of course we just have to put up with wearing dresses.
That’s my brother. Jake. He graduated from HS in 2001.
Fuck that asshole. We broke ourselves trying to survive. Some of us didn’t.
If you were in the UK, there was a little thing called Section 28 that made it illegal for schools to discuss “homosexually” (which was the catch all for any non-het, non-cis identity) in a positive light. Three internet wasn’t an easily accessible thing yet, and positive representation in the media vanishingly rare. Many of us who have grown up to be some variety of queer literally did not know there were options beyond Gay Man (predatory or tragic, will be dead from AIDS by 30), Lesbian (ugly and shrill, always predatory) or Transvestite (see Gay Man but more laughable).
Aside from similar experiencing similar levels of violence and ostracisation to those described by previous posters, would my mental health been better had I known I was bisexual and genderqueer at 15 (rather than 28 and 39 respectively) instead of being keenly aware that I was Doing Woman Wrong despite trying Really Hard to be normal and not sure how I was still failing? Almost certainly.
Do I remember Eddie Izzard describing herself in the mid 90s as “a lesbian with a man’s body” and feeling a strong sense of kinship, albeit the other way around, and then immediately dismissing it because female “transvestites” didn’t exist, so I guess I couldn’t feel like that? Painfully.
So why didn’t you get kids coming out at trans prior to 2000? Because if we weren’t getting any non-conformity beaten out of us by peers/teachers/parents, we were beating it out of ourselves thinking we were the only ones who felt like this so it could be real.
Yall are talking 2000 and earlier but ik kids at my fucking school who are too terrfied to come out bc they’re in a bad class.
I spent middle school clutching my identity in secret because if it came out I was more then a emo girl with funky colored hair we’d be fucking dead. Litterly.
We went to a good school, in a big-ish city. Our current school is considred one of the queerest, and yet we can still point out each and every closeted person we only know to be trans because they’ve confided in us.
Its still like this. It’s better, but it’s never been the time. It’s been that if we come out, we’re fucking dead.
Graduated high school in 1996. One of the first people I met in the school who wasn’t awful to me was a splendid, but awkward individual who took me home and handed me off to their big sister as a more suitable mentor for a weird, loud, mouthy little baby lesbian.
Said person was several grades ahead of me, and graduated long before I did, but I remained very close with the sister.
Said person fully transitioned the minute we were all out of high school, and he was my manager at my first full-time office job. No, he never talked about being trans on campus. He would have been beaten to death by the other students. But he was trans, and the minute he could live his truth, he did.
Graduated HS in 2010 from a private high school. There was one gay girl at our school and she was slowly forced to leave by the school banning her from all activities that involved changing clothes cause “parents were worried about their daughters”. She couldn’t do PE unless she changed in the bathroom at the other end of the school which made her late every time. She was banned from acting in any plays cause she wasn’t allowed to use the dressing room. She joined us in tech cause none of us cared (and 9/10 of us ended up coming out as queer later in life) but I was partnered with her anytime she had to go behind stage during costume changes ‘just in case she tried to go in the dressing room’. She couldn’t do sports or any activity that involved overnight trips. They took away everything from her. Most of us students didn’t care that she was gay, she was a great friend and smart kid, but the school didn’t care. The faculty and staff bullied her out of any group activities.
I came out 2 years after I graduated and slowly 9 other members of my 60 person class have come out since. 5 of us are trans in some way. 0 of us talked about it until after graduation cause we all watched how this girl was bullied by her own school and it didn’t matter how many of us students tried to say we were chill with her on our teams or in the dressing room, the faculty didn’t care, they had decided she was an “other” and she was gonna be treated like it.
I graduated from high school in 2001. (At the time, Ontario had an optional fifth year of high school. I’m that old.) I didn’t know anyone at the time who was out as trans; however, I know a few people from my graduating class who have since come out as such. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they weren’t trans back then. It just means that it wasn’t as safe to be anything but cishet at the time. It sickens me that things are getting to be that bad again.
In 2000-ish, when I was around 11, I was browsing a magazine rack and on the front of Girl Talk magazine (or Shout, or something similar) there was a headline reading “I’m a girl trapped in a boy’s body.”
My 11 year old self thought, “Oh, I didn’t know that could happen. Makes sense though?” and then I went about my day.
That’s 8% of transgender Americans. An additional 43% of transgender Americans are seriously considering moving due to laws criminalizing our existence and healthcare.
“So many people are completely helpless to get out, even with all the bumps and roadblocks, the fact is I’m still one of the lucky ones.” Said Sheena, a trans woman who fled from from Florida.
“it’s evident that the United States is in the throes of a swelling crisis of internally displaced political refugees. Over a million people, themselves contemplating relocation in the coming months, remain in a state of apprehensive vigilance, awaiting the potential signal that they too must bid farewell to their homes.”
Via Erin Reed, a professional policy tracker of transgender legislation. June 13, 2023.
Hey, this pride month (or literally any time of year), you wanna know something fairly easy and great you can do?
Contact your local library (or comment on their social media) positively for any pride/LGBTQIA+/queer-related displays or events they have going on.
Seriously.
What I’m seeing and hearing from the (mostly US-based) library workers in my groups and social circles is that the anti-queer (anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-drag queen story time, etc.) comments and complaints that have ramped up in the past year aren’t going away. Even library workers with supportive coworkers/bosses/boards are steeling themselves to deal with an avalanche of garbage, or are second-guessing their displays and events because the amount of vitriol can wear a person down so much. And the ones without supportive people or work environments? It’s worse.
Give the library something else: give them both the ammo (by being one of the numbers they can count worth the positive group) if they need to show their community isn’t wholly negative. Give them the compliment of knowing that their work got appreciated.
A comment like “I love this” or “Wow, that looks great!”
An email about how much you’re excited about X event
A call saying you wanted to let them know you appreciate this thing
Tagging them if you share a picture or positive comment on social media
“Cool shirt/pins/etc!” (Because people are also bring harassed about personally being queer, even if it’s not a library display)
Literally anything that would be positive for them to receive
