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^They’re currently taking donations for Maui mutual aid
Edit:
(Just pulling these from Twit)
Maui Strong by by Hawaiʻi Community Foundation
If you’re on insta and are local, there’s a lot of places you can volunteer and do drop offs.
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happy pride month balthier final fantasy
ALT
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I see so many older lesbians at the post office! Yesterday one walked in while I was shipping off a package, and her face lit up as soon as she saw me! We met eyes and shared the same thought
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Solidarity with children is often neglected or even made a joke of, so I wanna take a second and tell y'all what I wish I could go back in time and tell myself:
You’re right. School is bullshit, homework is bullshit, waking up early is bullshit, going to bed early is bullshit. Some adults are just pointlessly cruel, even those in positions of authority over you. Sometimes adults are wrong, and, in fact, sometimes you are right
You were born with an innate sense of justice and fairness and adults have spent your entire life trying to beat it out of you so you’ll shut up and do what you’re told in an unjust and unfair society. Don’t let them. Many of us have to take effort to relearn the wisdom you have right now, the ability to tell when something is bullshit even if you can’t articulate why yet
You deserve happiness, fulfillment, and liberation just as much as any adult. Those first 18 years are just as important as any other time in your life, and it’s time you’ll never get back. Don’t let anyone take them from you just because you’re too young to fight back
Question everything, and never take “that’s just the way it is” as an answer. Sometimes when things don’t make sense to you it’s because they just don’t make any goddamn sense
Pick your battles, and be strategic. Don’t take this post as permission to go starting fights for no reason. But remember that you have worth, and our society tends to not respect that. And you’re right: that is bullshit
(also, read Anarchy Works)
also also, read The Teenage Liberation Handbook
Haven’t read it myself, but if it interests you then you can read it here for free in case paying for a book online and having it shipped to your house isn’t an option for you
Also check out No! Against Adult Supremacy
Reblogging so I can find these book recs later.
My youngest son (16) struggles because he is not really suited to school as it exists. He’s literally brilliant but also inflexible and doesn’t work well when he has no control over his own day. He and I have just been trying to get through this for 11 years now. Next year he’s in a vocational program for game design, hopefully, which will cut back on a lot of the things he truly can’t stand:
- why is getting changed in front of everybody for gym class a thing?
- why do I have to sit through the same material in health class multiple times? (he is ace and sex-repulsed)
- why is this teacher angry with me? I don’t understand Google classroom.
- why does everyone keep asking me about my college plans? do they think I’m going through this one minute longer than I have to? fuck all the way off!
He has autism, ADHD, and a rampant anxiety disorder as a result of his first two disorders. Right now we are both enjoying his spring break, then it’s back to pushing through the best we can day after day until mid-June. And we are both really frank with each other about just getting through this.
If my parents had just earnestly told me “hey, we know this sucks, but there’s not much we can do about it so we just have to push through it together” then my school experience as an autistic kid would’ve been so much more bearable
Part of what motivated me writing this post was finding out as an adult that my parents hated several of my teachers and disagreed with their decisions but didn’t tell me at the time, so I wound up blaming myself. Just being told at the time “you’re right, this is unfair, and we’re on your side” would’ve made me feel so much less alone, even if the end result wasn’t any different
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Loving reminder from your land history auntie:
North American golf courses have had 50-100 years of arsenic and mercury based fungicide and herbicides applied to their soils.
Do not eat anything that has been grown on a golf course or downstream from a golf course. I know it sounds cool and radical, but you are too valuable to poison yourself with heavy metals.
Protect each other, turn your local golf course into a pollinator garden, not a sex forest or community garden.
Oh shit!
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I graduated high school in 99.
There was a student at our school named Wayne.
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.
There’s also the fact that I think a lot of people didn’t have the knowledge of the context that would explain what they were experiencing and thus couldn’t talk about it in those terms. It doesn’t mean they didn’t feel it, it just meant they didn’t know how to understand or express what they were feeling.
But I know people who absolutely expressed a confusion about their sense of self that later became very clear when they realized being gay or transgender was a thing.
^ This, exactly.
I was born in ‘94. I was friends with a transman in my class. And that was years before I even realized I was trans. He was the only trans person I had ever met. Before him, I had never even known it was an option. He was incredibly brave, and I remember how proud he was of himself. And thank fuck his parents approved of him. I can’t imagine how he would have kept up his confidence in public if not for that. But I’m sure he was bullied. He never talked about it, but we went to a big school. I’m sure it probably happened. But people don’t talk about it.
I had several friends who later came out as trans for the same reason that I did:
It wasn’t safe at home, it wasn’t safe at school, it was barely even safe in my own mind. And there were plenty of suicides at my school. We all knew what our options were. So we tried to just keep looking ahead, even when we couldn’t see any kind of future, or consider any kind of personal truth. Just surviving. That’s all I ever wanted, because that’s all I could possibly imagine.
And now that I’m almost 29, I’m no longer just surviving. And I still remember the day I had lied to my mother and said in an uncomfortable laugh, “oh I could never be attracted to girls” and without skipping a beat, she said, “Oh thank God” in the most disgusted tone, or how she laughed at me when I asked her to respect the pronouns my other friend who had just recently come out as trans, only for her to laugh at me and tell me 'no’. I still remember how my classmates relentlessly smack-talked our gym instructor for “looking like a lesbian” because of her buzz cut and her gaunt figure. She was fighting cancer. And she died my senior year. I don’t think she was queer, but did it even matter?
The person who wrote that tweet either ignored the evidence, or was a bully herself. I wouldn’t buy her words for one fucking penny.
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By Aytekin Yalçın for Carnale Room April 2023
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Illustrations form Lysistrata by Norman Lindsay (1930)
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BRENDAN FRASER AS GEORGE
GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE (1997) Dir. Sam Weisman#george is the himbo of all time - the himbo to which all others aspire#the ur-himbo#<— prev tags have it#he is SO hot and SO dumb and SO kind and no one will ever be hotter and dumber and kinder (@nonasuch)
