trans “activism”

I love that age when little girls get really  weird and mystical and savage

Like nine through eleven years old, those are some weird years for us

When I was 9-10 I read The Egypt Game and The Headless Cupid, taught myself hieroglyphics, and decided to practice witchcraft

The past three years, my son has come home telling me about the girls he knows, who are: 1. possessed by a demon controlled by a button at the back of her neck, 2. haunted by a dead aunt, and 3. converse regularly with the dead.

I used to talk to bees by running in circles of their dance patterns

this is my new favourite post omg ♡♡♡

girlhood in it’s natural unbridled state is magical

my Weird™ phase was when i started to get really into mythology and dragons, and space physics. I taught myself theories from stephen hawking and browsed history for references to Hekate or Nyx or Skadi. Wild times…

honestly the more time i spend on tumblr and especially in discourse hell, the more i appreciate the simple ass allies whose only opinion is “being gay isnt wrong” its so refreshing to remember that most people irl have no idea what 90% of all yalls made up nonsense means

what’s an apology without change?

A lie

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

women be hoarding small meaningful objects

Annemunition, a variety streamer who plays games like Rainbow Six, PUBG, God of War, and Overwatch, was playing Rainbow Six in her off time last week, away from the sometimes pressurized environment of her Twitch channel. The people she was playing with had no idea who she was, but they knew she was a woman, and that’s all they needed to know. Over the course of several rounds, they laid into her with a series of increasingly vile insults, calling her everything from “gamer girl” to “tranny bitch.” She continued to play like normal, dying in some rounds and clutching others for her team. When she did well, one guy said she stole his kill. When she did poorly, they used that to justify their attacks. “We’re not being like this because we don’t like women,” said one of the men. “We’re being like this because you’re shit, by the way.”

“Are you playing the right video game, miss?” the same man said later. “This isn’t like League Of Legends where you can just flash your titties on stream. It takes skill.”

“I hope you die,” another man said immediately afterward.

Annemunition kept her cool and finished the game. Then she decided to make an example of the people involved. She posted a video of the incident to her Twitter.

“‘Why don’t you use voice chat?’ ‘Why can’t I find a girlfriend who plays video games?’ ‘Why do you mute people who ask you if you’re a girl?’ Gee, I dunno,” she wrote.

The response was huge. As of now, the video has over half a million views and nearly 2,000 comments, some of which share similar online horror stories. Annemunition told Kotaku in an email that she posted the video to make a point. This is hardly the first time this kind of thing has happened to her, she said, and if it’d been during a stream, she would’ve just muted them. Since she was on her own, though, she decided to see how the situation would play out if she did nothing except make useful comments and help her team.

“As you saw in the video, that’s all it took for them to devolve into toxicity,” she said. “While I understand everyone, of all genders and backgrounds, can often be the subject of toxicity online, I really feel like people underestimate just how bad it can be for women or people who are recognized as ‘other’ over voice comms.”

She added that streamers often feel a pressure to just roll with the punches when it comes to verbal harassment or other serious issues, but she worries about the kind of example that sets.

“I feel like there are a lot of expectations for streamers not to complain about anything ever and that we should just be positive and ‘good vibes’ only,” she said. “When these types of things happen, I just think about all the young people (boys and girls) who experience this type of abuse online and don’t have the tools to stand up for themselves other than to mute people and pretend everything is fine.”

After Annemunition posted the video, one of the players who’d given her gallons of shit tried to apologize. In a sense. “I am extremely sorry for the way you feel, ” he wrote in a tweet from an account that’s since been deleted. “[K]now that the words I used were meaningless and have no substance.”Annemunition, a popular Twitch streamer with over 300,000 followers, was just trying to be a decent teammate and call shots in Rainbow Six Siege. Then, over voice chat, came the questions: “Are you a man or a female?” And the accusations: “You stole my fucking content. You’re shit at the game. Get out.”

“I appreciate that you want to apologize,” Annemunition wrote back. “But man, you went HARD just because you heard a woman’s voice… You called me a ‘fucking tranny bitch’ and told me to kill myself. Over nothing. All I did was exist.” However, she went on to write that she sincerely hopes the guy learns from this and wants to better himself.

“I don’t necessarily want to crucify people when I feel like there’s the potential for them to walk away from the situation thinking ‘Wow, I messed up. I said something really awful and it came back to bite me. I won’t do that again,’” she told Kotaku, explaining why she chose to respond so kindly to an apology that was dodgy at best. “I wanted him to understand the gravity of his actions and the fact that words can be hurtful and that your actions have consequences.”

In online games, she continued, people can tell others to kill themselves and face no real repercussions—or at least, not the sort of repercussions that’d convince them to cork it for more than a handful of matches. Meanwhile, the people being harassed are encouraged—both by their peers and the way many games’ reporting systems work—to just shrug it off in the moment, no matter how much it’s worming under their skin and writhing around.

“Gamers have learned that they can do these things without blowback because the solution so many people suggest is just to mute them and move on,” Annemunition said.

That’s why she decided to post the video, risking even more harassment from eager-to-pounce internet mobs in the process. If nobody creates consequences for this sort of thing that are immediate and consistent, yet also impactful in a way that’ll encourage them to learn rather than doubling down, nothing will change.

“I’m just sick of sweeping this behavior under the rug and pretending it’s all fine and dandy,” she said. “It’s easy to sweep things under the rug; it’s hard to ask people to be better. Especially when so many people are just resigned to accepting the fact that online gaming and toxicity go hand-in-hand.”

“Maybe that makes me a naive fool,” she added, “but I refuse to accept that we can’t treat each other with a little more kindness.”

You go girl.

Like this is why i feel like making every game multiplayer is antagonistic towards a lot of women gamers who literally don’t have the energy to deal with possible harassment every time they want to play a game

When I was 15 I got harassed by a bunch of guys on multiplayer asking for my nudes and shit just because they heard my voice. Literally only used private voice channels from then on in Teamspeak

trans identifying males are not oppressed. there have been more people killed by cows in the UK over a period of 3 years than there have been trans murders over a decade.

your chances of suffering violent crime go down if you are white and trans.

Ten core principles necessary for the remodeling of your brain to take place:

1. Change is mostly limited to those situations in which the brain is in the mood for it.

If you are alert, on the ball, engaged, motivated, ready for action, the brain releases the neurochemicals necessary to enable brain change. When disengaged, inattentive, distracted, or doing something without thinking that requires no real effort, your neuroplastic switches are “off.”

2. The harder you try, the more you’re motivated, the more alert you are, and the better (or worse) the potential outcome, the bigger the brain change.

If you’re intensely focused on the task and really trying to master something for an important reason, the change experienced will be greater.

3. What actually changes in the brain are the strengths of the connections of neurons that are engaged together, moment by moment, in time.

The more something is practiced, the more connections are changed and made to include all elements of the experience (sensory info, movement, cognitive patterns). You can think of it like a “master controller” being formed for that particular behavior which allows it to be performed with remarkable facility and reliability over time.

4. Learning-driven changes in connections increase cell-to-cell cooperation which is crucial for increasing reliability.

Merzenich explains this by asking you to imagine the sound of a football stadium full of fans all clapping at random versus the same people clapping in unison. He explains, “The more powerfully coordinated your [nerve cell] teams are, the more powerful and more reliable their behavioral productions.”

5. The brain also strengthens its connections between teams of neurons representing separate moments of successive things that reliably occur in serial time.

This allows your brain to predict what happens next and have a continuous “associative flow.” Without this ability, your stream of consciousness would be reduced to “a series of separate, stagnating puddles,” explains Merzenich.

6. Initial changes are temporary.

Your brain first records the change, then determines whether it should make the change permanent or not. It only becomes permanent if your brain judges the experience to be fascinating or novel enough or if the behavioral outcome is important, good or bad.

7. The brain is changed by internal mental rehearsal in the same ways and involving precisely the same processes that control changes achieved through interactions with the external world.

According to Merzenich, “You don’t have to move an inch to drive positive plastic change in your brain. Your internal representations of things recalled from memory work just fine for progressive brain plasticity-based learning.”

8. Memory guides and controls most learning.

As you learn a new skill, your brain takes note of and remembers the good attempts, while discarding the not-so-good trys. Then, it recalls the last good pass, makes incremental adjustments, and progressively improves.

9. Every movement of learning provides a moment of opportunity for the brain to stabilize – and reduce the disruptive power of – potentially interfering backgrounds or “noise.”

Each time your brain strengthens a connection to advance your mastery of a skill, it also weakens other connections of neurons that weren’t used at that precise moment. This negative plastic brain change erases some of the irrelevant or interfering activity in the brain.

10. Brain plasticity is a two-way street; it is just as easy to generate negative changes as it is positive ones.

You have a “use it or lose it” brain. It’s almost as easy to drive changes that impair memory and physical and mental abilities as it is to improve these things. Merzenich says that older people are absolute masters at encouraging plastic brain change in the wrong direction.

my uterus realizing we aren’t having a baby after building up a lining for three weeks:

O M G

Life lessons I’m learning in my 20s: Relationships aren’t just about who makes you happy, while very integral, happiness is fleeting, our emotions are always changing. Depending on someone to make you happy can create a very toxic situation. Rather the focus should be on who helps you learn and grow, who supports you while you work on yourself and who you can be honest with and trust. That’s love. 

this x100000000000

I needed this today

Thank you @sixpenceeeblog for writing this and thank you@constantbearhugs for bringing this before my eyes.

So, when my maternal grandmother died, we had to find loving, permanent homes for all five of her cats because otherwise she would have risen from the grave to kill the entire family. We took in Chloe because Chloe was my grandmother’s favorite, and she made my mom promise to look after her. Now my mother treats Chloe like her third child, and the cat is basically plastered to her 24/7 when she isn’t hiding from some imagined enemy like the dustbuster or my dad’s footsteps.

Anyway, we wound up giving the rest of the cats to this couple that runs a joint called Kitty Korner. They try to find loving homes for all the cats they take in, but will care for the unadoptables (read: assholes) for the rest of their lives. That’s great, because one of the cats we gave to these poor women was Tobey. I have no idea why my grandmother ever adopted Tobey. He was a huge schmuck. The most handsome orange tomcat you ever saw, and he loved to crawl in your lap. But if you ever tried to touch him, he would switch immediately into Kill Mode and you could say goodbye to your hand. Needless to say, having him in your lap was awkward. It was like holding a bomb.

Kitty Korner sends us detailed letters every year to give us updates on how Tobey’s doing. Basically, they are status reports on how much of a douche Tobey is and continues to be. These women are saints. I guess they really like cats, because these letters are like a full page of single-spaced text. But more or less, they amount to:

BUT!!!! The past few years, Tobey has apparently been making steady improvement. And in our most recent letter, we have been informed that he is no longer doing things like venturing upstairs expressly to beat the living shit out of the other cats at Kitty Korner. He will also let you pet him, and when he’s had enough he’ll give a warning nip instead of removing your limb. In fact, Tobey, at a ripe old age of 14, is ready for a new home! With an experienced cat owner, comes the necessary caveat, and like… no kids. At all. Ever. Or other cats, probably. But at least he’s no longer a psychopath.

WE GOT ANOTHER LETTER FROM KITTY KORNER AND WE THOUGHT TOBEY HAD FINALLY KICKED THE BUCKET BUT IN FACT HE HAS FOUND A NEW HOME, AT AGE 16, WITH AN ELDERLY MAN WHO RECENTLY LOST HIS OWN CAT.

I MAY CRY.

2/1/2016: old man Tobey still loving his forever home :’)

Amazing

The adoption story to end all adoption stories. Hey, does Kitty Korner have a Kickstarter anywhere?

The outpouring of love for this post is amazing! I’m going to cry at the office.

They do not have a Kickstarter, however, as a no-kill foster home run exclusively through volunteer work, they always welcome donations and you also have the ability to sponsor a cat. You’ll get detailed photos and status reports on your kitty, and should he or she get a happy ending like Tobey, you’ll be the first to know!

My grandmother was a card-carrying crazy cat lady until the day she died, and she was a big supporter of Kitty Corner. The women who run it are as devoted to rescue animals as she was her entire life. Wherever she is now, she’d be humbled to know just how many people were touched by Tobey’s comeback story.

I’m not crying, you are… 😭😭😭

Garden variety man mansplains to women what we are or aren’t allowed to care about.

Neckbeard better be careful pussyhat granny on his left is looking like she’s about to give him a taste of what savagery women are put through constantly every-damn-where on this planet.

Why does this man think what he says matters?

Leave it to males to shove their way into a WOMEN’S march and tell women how we should behave

Anyway i very much resent the bonds between women being derogatorily waved off as “cis-terhood” as though they’re less valuable than the time spent pouring energy and resources into coddling males like we’ve always been made to do

Males and TIMs need to be fucking banned from attending any feminist or women’s events, period. They have nothing valuable to contribute. They just get in the fucking way and make women uneasy. It isn’t FOR them.

Members of my family have been helped by service dogs for hearing impairment and diabetes over the years. These service dogs are such amazing allies! I just wish everyone with the need could be able to have a service dog.

If you think “sex work” should be fully legal based on a sense of social justice and the idea that it’s the best thing for the women in the industry, consider this:

Maybe there are some women who truly do want to be “sex workers”. Maybe some women really can do it without being traumatised. Maybe they even find it empowering. I’ll entertain that idea for a moment to get this point across. The fact is that the demand will always outweigh the supply. Huge numbers of men want to buy sexual access to women’s bodies, and in places where it is legal that demand only increases. In comparison, only a very small number of women truly choose it and want to do it. So what happens when there aren’t enough women willing to offer their bodies up for men to buy to match the number of men wanting to buy them? You get women forced into it by abusive pimp “boyfriends”. You get the sex trafficking of millions of impoverished women. You get huge numbers of women facing an option between prostitution and poverty. 

I would rather the small number of women who might genuinely want to be in the sex industry have to find new jobs than have pimps, johns, and brothel owners/managers be able to legally get away with doing this to women. This is why we need the Nordic model, and why I’ll always be an abolitionist despite the loud minority of sex worker activists who assert ad nauseam that there’s nothing inherently wrong with the sex industry.

(Learn more about the Nordic model here)

Life Cleanse - What I Did

Promo: Like or interested in my tips and want to contribute yourself? Check out my new project Illuminate! Even if you don’t apply, please pass it along to those you think would be interested. Thank you!

hell yeah i’m a catholic i’ve been addicted to cats my whole life

Mandy Hale, The Single Woman  (via awelltraveledwoman)

I am so glad ppl like this exist bc inside I’m a stupid gullible marshmallow who’s just like “aw he said he’s sorry that’s all that matters right everyone deserves a second chance love everybody” and like no it doesn’t matter that he said he was sorry and the women whose lives have been permanently altered by Louis CK’s actions matter more than his remorse and I’m honestly just wondering is this a part of female socialization to be like “okay he said he’s sorry I better move on before everyone gets mad at me for being mad about it” or is it from growing up and then rehashing abusive relationship after abusive relationship because I’ve been socialized to see mens abuse of power as normal and that when a man says he’s sorry that’s enough and asking to be treated with respect is unrealistic so “he said he’s sorry” is the most I’ve come to expect from men