Eid Mubarak to all you lovely humans celebrating. May your days be filled with all the love and happiness that you deserve ☾☀︎︎❣︎
Right to change legal gender in Latin America and the Caribbean (2023)
Self-determination: Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Bonaire, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, St. Martin, St. Barthelemy, 21 Mexican states.
Prohibitive requirements: Peru, Bolivia, Suriname, 11 Mexican states
SRS required: Panama, US Virgin Islands
Complicated: El Salvador
No legal gender identity change: Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Guyana, Venezuela, Paraguay, Jamaica, Bahamas, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados, St Lucia, Dominica, Antigua & Barbuda, Grenada, Cayman Islands, Turks & Caicos, Montserrat, Falkland Islands, Aruba, St. Maarten, Curacao, British Virgin Islands.
If you haven't already please sign this petition to slow the assault on trans rights in the uk:
Signal boosting! If you're British or reside in the UK please support our trans hermanas by signingthis petition! 🏳️⚧️
A team of Indigenous Yucuna women in the Colombian Amazon are rescuing and documenting the remaining oral knowledge on bees and their roles in the ecosystem, along with the traditional classification system of diverse bee species. With the help of nine elders, they are documenting and sketching tales and songs to gather bee names, characteristics, behaviors, roles in their crop fields and the places where bees build beehives. […]
Je’chu […]. “He is […] our grandfather,” narrates Carmenza Yucuna Rivas, leader of the Miriti-Parana Indigenous Reserve in Colombia, located in the Amazon Rainforest. […] “Beehives […] give us the opportunity to create chakras [food gardens typically using an agroforestry model with divers plant species] […]. They let us have something to cultivate […] in the first place.”
To rescue and document the remaining oral knowledge of the origin of bees in their culture and their importance to their ecosystems and territory, Carmenza is leading research about these species with 36 women from the 12 communities part of the Indigenous reserve. […]
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Since the second half of 2020, Carmenza and her colleagues have been going to each of the communities and speaking to elders to gather information, such as tales and songs that talk of the origin of the bees. They also draw […]. Each of them has taken the task of sketching the stories on paper to describe the insects.
Their aim is to classify the bees according to the cultural system of the Yucuna-Matapí, Tanimuca-Letuama, and Tuyuca-Macuna peoples, including their names, characteristics, and the places where they build the beehives.
—
Carmenza describes one by one the most relevant bees in the territory. The munumunú are the Melipona, that is, the bees that produce honey; the mapa or mapachara are the ones that produce the wax that is used for healing and rituals; the mapakayuna are small and live next to the crops to guarantee their productivity; and the jiñuna “are a great species,” says Carmenza. They live in the Yavarí coconut trees on the river shore where they build huge yellow beehives. […] Carmenza says that even with the research process and its results, the findings and daily learnings keep surprising them. […]
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“We’ll take all this knowledge to schools so that teachers can share it with the kids and show them the tales, the drawings, and the classifications and talk about the value of bees in culture. But also, so that they know that bees aren’t beings without importance,” says Carmenza. “They care for us without realizing it. They, through the pollination of trees and flora, help the world breathe.”
—
Headline, images, captions, and all text published by: Astrid Arellano, as translated by Maria Angeles Salazar. “Indigenous women record age-old knowledge of bees in Colombia’s Amazon.” Mongabay. 8 February 2023. [Originally published by Arellano as “El origen de las abejas: la importancia del conocimiento ancestral indígena para salvarlas en Colombia” at Mongabay’s Latam site on 12 August 2022.]
Hello everyone, although I wouldn't have expected to post stuff like this, this is a time of dire need.
At around 4 AM GMT+3, an earthquake hit the southern provinces of Türkiye: Kahramanmaraş and Hatay with the power of 7.8
The largest earthquake ever recorded in the region since 1939.
People were't able to escape as they were sleeping, there is over 5k injured right now and the estimated death count surpasses 16k.
The entire army and the special forces have been directed to the area to aid the rescue effort with many nations directing aid to Türkiye.
There is literal people, sharing their and their family's locations on Twitter, under the tons of rubble for the authorities to find them. over 140 THOUSAND building are reduced to dust and foreign report that the damage costs are estimated around 3 billion USD.
As a Turkish citizen myself, although thankfully not affected by it due to living far more west, I am devastated and exhausted by this. That my nation who is already struggling from many angles, stuck by such a natural disaster that affects so many people. It's just so exasperating.
For the ones who are eligible, I really really urge that you donate to the Turkish Red Cresent and AFAD (The Turkish Disaster and Emergency Management Office) to help the thousands and thousands of people struggling for their lives. I will be personally donating also and they accept donations in USD and Euros. For the ones not available to donate, plase share this post around more communities so we can spread the awareness of the situation to more people. I am linking the necessary websites below. (THE WEBISTES HAVE AN ENGLISH OPTION IN THE TOP RIGHT)
Stay safe everyone
-nootnoot#0109
A report on transgender women athletes in elite sport has found that if UCI [Union Cycliste Internationale] rules are adhered to, there is currently no substantial evidence of any biological advantages for trans women competing in elite women’s sport.
It found there was little evidence that biomedical factors related to male puberty such as lung size, bone density and hip-to-knee joint angle predict an unfair advantage. But some evidence that social factors like nutrition, training and access to equipment do.
These are just some of the key findings listed in an 86-page report titled Transgender Women Athletes and Elite Sport: A Scientific Review, which was published in late 2022 and commissioned by the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (CCES), an ethical sport advocacy non-profit with a vision of fair, safe, accessible, and inclusive sport for everyone.
The inclusion of trans women in elite women’s sport has been a hot button issue of late with high profile instances such as Emily Bridges’ attempt to compete in the UK sparking concern and upset on all sides. While the inclusion of trans women has led to protests by those who worry that cis women (the term for women born anatomically female) are at a competitive disadvantage at some U.S. races.
However, the report concluded that “the fears that cis women need be protected from trans women in elite sport are unsubstantiated and misplaced.
“What threatens women’s elite sport, for cis and trans women, is not trans women, but is rather misogyny in the form of underfunding, non-parity in participation and leadership, inequitable sport space allocation/access, and a range of sporting opportunities not afforded to women (cis women and trans women) in equitable ways.”
Source: cyclingweekly.com
hey if you're a UK resident can you sign this petition and if not please rb to spread the word
this is an official UK government petition that they have to respond to if it reaches 10,000 signatures
So, this one is actually a lot more important than reporting and blocking spam bots. That post has 20,000 notes rn, so it would mean a lot to me if you could give the same treatment to this as you gave to that (@neil-gaiman if you're listening).
If the petition gets 100,000 signatures they have to consider it for debate in parliament.
It's a crime that Gender Recognition Reform was blocked in England, but Scottish MPs voted it into law and that the UK Parliament overturned that is in direct contravention of democracy as a whole.
It's a pretty serious big deal. Please sign, or, if you're not a UK citizen, please boost.
i will never stop thinking about this poem my greek professor showed us
[Image description: a poem by Elisa Gonzalez titled “After My Brother’s Death, I Reflect on the Iliad,” published in the New Yorker on April 18, 2020. She won the 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and is working on her first book.
The poem says:
The water cuts out while shampoo still clogs my hair. The nurse who swabs my nose hopes I don’t have the virus, it’s a bitch. The building across from the cemetery calls itself LIFE STORAGE.
My little brother was shot, I tell the barista who asks how things have been, and tip extra for her inconvenience. We speak only to the dead, someone tells me—to comfort, I assume, or inspire,
but I take it literally, as I am wont: even my shut up and fuck and let’s cook tonight, those are for you, Stephen. You won’t come to me in my dreams, so I must communicate by other avenues.
A friend sends an image from Cy Twombly’s “Fifty Days at Iliam” —a red bloom, the words “like a fire that consumes all before it”— and asks: Have you seen this? It’s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
If I have, I can’t remember, though I did visit with you, when you were eleven or twelve, when you tripped silent alarm after silent alarm, skating out of each room
as guards jostled in, and I—though charged with keeping you from trouble—joined the game, and the whole time we never laughed, not till we were released into the grand air we couldn’t touch and could.
You are dead at twenty-two. As I rinse dishes, fumble for my keys, buy kale and radishes, in my ear Priam repeats, I have kissed the hand of the man who killed my son. Would I do that? I ask as I pass the store labelled SIGNS SIGNS.
I’ve studied the mug shot of the man who killed you; I can imagine his hands. Of course I would. Each finger, even. To hold your body again. And to resurrect you? Who knows what I am capable of.
If I were. Nights, I replay news footage: your blood on asphalt, sheen behind caution tape. Homer’s similes, I’ve been told, are holes cut in the cloth between the world of war and another, more peaceful world. On rereading, I find even there, a man kills his neighbor.
“Let Achilles cut me down, / as soon as I have taken my son into my arms and have satisfied my desire for grief”—this, my mind’s new refrain in the pharmacy queue, in the train’s rattling frame.
The same friend and I discuss a line by Zbigniew Herbert “where a distant fire is burning / like a page of the Iliad.” It’s nearly an ontological question, my friend says, the instability of reference:
The fires in the pages of the poem, the literal page set afire. We see double. You are the boy in the museum. You are the body consumed, ash.
Alone in a London museum, I saw a watercolor of twin flames, one black, one a gauzy red, only to learn the title is “Boats at Sea.” It’s like how sometimes I forget you’re gone. But it’s not like that, is it? Not at all. When in this world, similes carry us nowhere.
And now I see again the boy pelting through those galleries a boy not you, a flash of red, red, chasing, or being chased— Or did I invent him? Mischief companion. Brother. Listen to me
plead for your life though even in the dream I know you’re already dead. How do I insure my desire for grief is never satisfied? Was Priam’s ever? I tell my friend, I want the page itself to burn.
End image description]
“When you’re a trans woman you are made to walk this very fine line, where if you act feminine you are accused of being a parody and if you act masculine, it is seen as a sign of your true male identity. And if you act sweet and demure, you’re accused of reinforcing patriarchal ideas of female passivity, but if you stand up for your own rights and make your voice heard, then you are dismissed as wielding male privilege and entitlement. We trans women are made to teeter on this tightrope, not because we are transsexuals, but because we are women. This is the same double bind that forces teenage girls to negotiate their way between virgin and whore, that forces female politicians and business women to be agressive without being seen as a bitch, and to be feminine enough not to emasculate their alpha male colleagues, without being so girly as to undermine their own authority.”
— Julia Serano, Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, p 28-9 (via goth-gallus)
turn mythical
turn into a palomita and rise, rise into
smoke, a burn scar
a child’s daydream: am I becoming, have I begun
— Christina Olivares, from “Portrait,” published in Hayden’s Ferry Review
Tweet description:
Announcing the Rumah Angkat Fundraising Campaign!
We aim to raise RM150,000 for our next year's operation costs. This amount can help us to secure the rental, utilities and provide the best quality of care to our residents in Rumah Angkat. @pluho_org @pelangicampaign https://t.co/LiFcKWmLZQ
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Rumah Angkat is a transitional housing service that aims to provide temporary housing, case management, and psychosocial support for LGBTIQ persons in Malaysia who are escaping violence, discrimination, and homelessness (description taken from their official website)
They are currently looking for donations totaling RM 150,000 (USD 34k) that will cover next year's operation cost
For international donation, you can send it to
Hello,
If you live outside the U.S/live in a state with protected abortion rights and are looking for a place to donate, I recommend donating to abortion funds at the US-MEX border. Many people in the border are either in the process of getting their migration status in order or are undocumented immigrants. As such they CANNOT leave the area without putting their status/themselves at risk*, meaning that they would not be able to leave Texas to obtain an abortion at another state.
I have added pictures of two abortion funds I'm familiar with, both located in South Texas/Rio Grande Valley, but there are so many more out there so if you know one feel free to add it!
Alt text added
*At 100 miles from the border there are Border Patrol checkpoints
Europe is often imagined to be ‘progressive’ when it comes to abortion, but a lot of people who need abortions are falling through the cracks of the system:
- In Poland, abortion is almost entirely illegal.
- There are only a few countries in Europe where abortion is legal after the 14th week
- Undocumented people, migrant workers, and people without health insurance are often denied access to abortion services.
- Stigma and social control prevents people from seeking abortion. Anonymous options are not always available.
- Anti-abortion groups are becoming increasingly prolific, setting up fake clinics and websites with misinformation (most notably at the moment are misinformation campaigns about the supposed ‘dangers’ of abortion pills that are in fact totally safe.)
But there are answers. Abortion Without Borders is a network of mutual aid groups that helps people access abortion.
They can help you access an abortion in your own home, using abortion pills that are safe and indistinguishable from a natural miscarriage. Absolutely no one needs to know.
If you’re too far along for pills or don’t want pills, they can help you access abortion in a clinic in a country where abortion is legal up to your 24th week. They can help with travel, housing, translation and the costs of the abortion itself.
Their website mainly focuses on Poland because that is where the greatest need is at the moment, but wherever you are: if you need an abortion and can’t get one, they will help.
“Trans women are willful women; women who have to insist on being women, who have to keep insisting, again and again, often in the face of violent and repeated acts of misgendering. Any feminists who do not stand up, who do not wave their arms to protest against this misgendering, have become straightening rods.”
— Sara Ahmed, “Living a Lesbian Life”
Those who have to insist on being women are willful women, and the arm becomes your resource, something that can lend its hand in a battle to be. Trans women are willful women; women who have to insist on being women, who have to keep insisting, again and again, often in the face of violent and repeated acts of misgendering. Any feminists who do not stand up, who do not wave their arms to protest against this misgendering, have become straightening rods. When I ask for a revival of the militancy of the figure of the lesbian feminist I am imagining lesbian feminism as in a fundamental and necessary alliance with transfeminism. Transfeminism has also brought feminism back to life. And can I add here that an anti-trans stance is an anti-feminist stance; it is against the feminist project of creating worlds to support those for whom gender fatalism (boys will be boys, girls will be girls) is fatal; a sentencing to death. We have to hear that fatalism as punishment and instruction: it is the story of the rod, of how those who have wayward wills or who will waywardly (boys who will not be boys, girls who will not be girls) are beaten. We will not be beaten. We need to drown these anti-trans voices out by raising the sound of our own. Our voices need to become our arms; rise up; rise up.
inrainbows
the second bit of text is also from living a lesbian life.
I am not being hyperbolic when I say every cop who sat around and made sure this happened to these kids for an hour deserves a public execution.
If you guys can, please donate to Miah's gofundme so she can go to therapy and get the help she needs to deal with this trauma
This comes from young activists in Russia who want to let the world know that despite the official line, there are Russians who oppose the war in Ukraine.
They've planned a protest for May 21 and are asking us to share this info, in the hopes that it will get through censorship. Please support them and spread it as far as possible!
#wontdetain #nowar #НеЗадержите #НетВойне #РеальныйСоцОпрос
Aunque sé que no debo
Pensar en ti, bebé, pero cuando bebo
Me viene tu nombre, tu cara