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buff women,,

@icedgroove

iced // 32 gays in a trenchcoat

*emerges from under a rock* did... did the porn bots finally leave?

“select your gender” except the options are uquiz aesthetics

less of this

more of this

this is what im talking about. that’s gender

notajerusalemcricketd-deactivat

Most inclusive option:

professional-chaotic-dumbass

[uploads DOOM as my gender]

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So fun fact that won't surprise anyone who knows me: I've done this. My job had a inclusivity survey that pissed me off (they included "transgender" and "cis gender" as possible responses for "what's your gender?", alongside "male" and "female"!) but I noticed they didn't put a length limit on the gender field if you selected "other". So...

They didn't accept binary files (which is fine, my gender isn't binary) so I had to base64 encode doom, but even though it froze chrome for nearly 8 hours, I was able to paste a full copy of the Doom install disks into the form.

as a side project while waiting on chrome to unfreeze, I developed a way to encode Doom into PNG files that could safely be posted on Twitter without them being corrupted into JPEGs, as Twitter loves to do.

Anyway, the thread is here, but really all you need is this one screenshot.

notajerusalemcricketd-deactivat

Oh my god they ran doom on their gender

another-exclus

Everything is like “QUEER history” and “List of QUEER young adult books” or “Top 10 QUEER movies” and queer this and queer that and for the love of god please just say LGBT.

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lythelia-art

But queer is more inclusive

And faster to pronounce if you are talking instead of writing.

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another-exclus

It’s not more inclusive, and if your excuse of using a slur as a blanket term is “it’s faster to say”, GENUINELY what is wrong with you

It’s called economía del lenguaje.

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savethelesbians

It’s also the respected academic term?? The acronym isn’t static and it’s usage is varied by things like generational difference, location, and knowledge of the community. Even just in the U.S. in the last few decades the common usage gone from GLBT to LGBT to LGBTQ, to LGBTQA/LGBTQIA/LGBTQIAP/etc (Which, let me tell you as someone who has given presentations in the past using these updated acronyms, are all real mouthfulls), to LGBT+.

Also yes, queer is more inclusive! Especially coming at it from an academic standpoint, people didn’t always use or identify with the terms we use now and you can’t always try to cram them into our modern perceptions of sexuality. We can argue for years about whether a famous historical figure was gay or bisexual or straight and trans or whatever, but if we can all agree that they were somehow queer then using that term allows us to move past the debate and into productive discussion. And not everybody everywhere shares the same terms for sexual and gender identity, or even the same concepts of those things, so queer really is a more inclusive term in a lot of cases.

Like yeah if you’re talking specifically about gay or trans people you can just say gay or transgender, but if you’re talking about more than one identity or someone who doesn’t conform to our perceptions of ‘LGBT,’ or a person or people whose identity you don’t know, queer is just the better word.

“That’s SO gay”, “Oh my god, you’re not a LESBIAN, are you?”

Your words are slurs, too. Why do you get your words, but I don’t get mine? What makes you so special?

I’m here, I’m queer, go fuck yourself.

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queer is not a slur, stop drinking the TERF koolaid

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every time one of you fools spout about ‘queer is a slur’ a terf laughs because their fucking plan to make that word ‘taboo’ is fucking working you dipshit.

I did not get my degree in queer literature for you all to keep pulling this bullshit.

baby gays,,,, i beg of you to learn your queer history and stop listening to terf bullshit

every single one of our labels has been used as a slur against us.

terfs and -phobes are always going to try and hurt us with what we identify as. but the fact remains these are OUR labels and always have been.

we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.

I don’t know if this is just because I’m not American but I’ve never heard queer used as a slur. Ever. Meanwhile gay was the insult in the 2000s here. Everything you didn’t like was ‘soo gay’. Queer wasn’t even a word most of us knew back then.

It just baffled me that people would think an identifier is automatically a slur just because someone uses it to mock someone. If we did that gay would be a slur. Stupid would be a slur. Autistic would be a slur.

The reason people are upset about the word queer is that it’s a unifying term. You can say you’re queer and all people will know is that you’re part of the community. But you can’t say you’re LGBT, you have to say you’re gay or trans or ace. They don’t want you to be ambiguously queer. They want you to say which kind of queer you are so they can decide whether you’re undesirable.

yeah in the 90s and early 2000s kids would call each other “gay” as an insult. But no one ties themselves in knots over whether “gay” is a slur. So yeah, please ffs learn your history.

They want you to say which kind of queer you are so they can decide whether you’re undesirable.

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To my international friends: If you ever wonder why Americans are the way they are, just remember that 1/3rd of all US citizens are in a cult that teaches them to suppress the activity of their prefrontal cortex, particularly when it comes to doubt, critical thinking, and differentiating emotional responses from personal values.

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1/3rd of Americans are Evangelical, and Evangelical Protestantism is a cult. We just don’t think of it as one because it’s so normalized. However, it follows the B.I.T.E. model of cult dynamics.

Evangelism teaches its followers to always maintain states of bliss and ecstasy for Jesus. What this does is condition the brain to always operate out of less-evolved parts; areas that are responsible for more primal emotions like euphoria, anger, and fear. Because of how we’ve evolved to survive, the brain will actually shut down our higher functioning—including critical thinking skills—in favor of these primal emotions, when they’re active.

Always feeling bliss = never questioning or feeling doubt. Evangelicals may actually fear the thoughts that do originate from their higher brain-parts because they think it’s the devil tempting them away from their religion. They’ll engage in self-indoctrination techniques to make this stop.

This creates a cognitive dissonance so great that many Americans have no separation between how they feel and what they believe. This is really bad because their minds have literally no defense against undue influence. They’ll vote for the dude who hyped them up enough. They’ll buy into the conspiracy theory that excites them the most. They’ll side with whatever gets the best reaction out of them, and getting a rise out of people is super easy to do.

Things like financial insecurity and low employment make this worse, too.

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And just to be clear, this kind of conditioning can happen to anyone, regardless of their intellectual capacity.

Cult conditioning has nothing to do with how smart or dumb people are. You can condition literally any brain with the right time and environment.

Counteracting undue influence is a skill, and like any skill, it needs to be taught.

Cult experts frequently point out that the smarter people are, the more susceptible they are to this once the initial hooks are in, and the harder they are to deprogram. This is because while this kind of conditioning does not rely on intelligence, the ability to rationalise does -- the smarter someone is, the better they can rationalise what they already believe, so if they’re committed to following their feelings, a smart person is much better at making it seem (to themselves as well as others) that they’re actually using logic and reason rather than making ad-hoc justifications after the fact.

Also, people who know (or believe) that they’re smarter than average tend to assume that this makes them harder to fool, conditon, or lie to. Which makes somebody much easier to fool, condition, or lie to.

So I am from the US but now live in Argentina, and as The American(tm) I often get reasonably asked the question, "Why are Americans, you know, like that?"

The best and most immediate answer I could come up with, and the one I've stuck to, is telling people that America is a country defined by being a haven for cults and religious extremists since its inception. And people are always like "god that makes so much sense."

But you know, the wildest thing is if I tried to tell any given American this (which I have) chances are they'd be like, "No way, that's absurd." And I think the thing is, if you're an American and have lived most or all of your life in America, this is just your normal. But when you live somewhere that is less saturated with religious dogma, cults and anti-intellectualism, it's readily apparent.