― Cho Nam-Joo, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
[ text ID: You’re right. In a world where doctors can cure cancer and do heart transplants, there isn’t a single pill to treat menstrual cramps.’ Her sister pointed at her own stomach. ‘The world wants our uterus to be drug-free. Like sacred grounds in a virgin forest. ]
I tore open your letter and licked the envelope's seal for any lingering taste of you.
- Emily Dickinson to Susan Gilbert
soulmates aren’t found they’re made and remade and remade and they’re a a series of constant conscious decisions and choices and that’s honestly better and so amazing
sometimes I see pictures from when I was younger and it makes me wonder why I spent so much time hating myself. sweet little baby me. I was still growing. I was still learning. I was still getting used to my own skin. I didn’t deserve that
should we do vows? we can, if you want to. you think of what you want to say… i’ll think too. i don’t need to think… i’m ready, i know.
“THE SEVEN HUSBANDS OF EVELYN HUGO” BY TAYLOR JENKINS REID
Today, Wired advises you to “Stop Renting E-Scooters Every Day and Just Buy One Already!”, which may or may not be good advice in terms of your own safety and the safety of others, but if you like the idea, you don’t need to spend $1000-$1600 to risk your neck and the necks of everyone else on your commute.
Many cities have banned e-scooter short-hire vehicles and are impounding them, and in other cities, repo men have been busily seizing scooters left on private property, and the e-scooter companies, who already lose money on every scooter (they’re making it up in volume!) just abandon their scooters to rust away in impound lots and turn into e-waste.
Which means that you can pick up scooters for pocket-change in municipal auctions! There’s only one problem: the control units of these scooters only take orders from companies like Bird and Lime, so even after you own one of these things, you can’t ride it without paying an overcapitalized bezzle for the privilege.
That is…not unless you swap out the control unit! For $30 or less, you can get a conversion kit that swaps in with just a few screws’ worth of fiddling. Once you do that, that city impound scooter becomes your scooter, at a price so cheap you can buy two!
This strategy is totally legal, and totally toxic to Bird and Lime’s business model, and boy do they know it: last year, Bird threatened to sue me for writing about this in a bid to keep the news from spreading. Luckily, we recognized the hollowness of their threat and, with help from our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we were able to force them to back down and issue an apology (albeit not a very good one).
Consider this our bit of service journalism for the day: if you really want to own your own e-scooter, don’t contribute to the growing mountains of e-waste created by these things. Instead, help your city defray the costs of impounding the scooters that feckless, overcapitalized companies like Bird and Lime have littered our streets with, blocking wheelchair and stroller access and putting other sidewalk users at risk from high-speed, potentially lethal “personal transports.”
Just a friendly reminder that I would never have thought it was possible to go back and remake my previous work, uncovering lost art and forgotten gems along the way, if you hadn’t emboldened me. Red is about to be mine again, but it has always been ours. Tonight we begin again. Red (my version) is out now.
📷: Beth Garrabrant
For those who ever said that women over 40 y/o are ugly, useless or idk "lost their value"
Shut the fuck up
A TV SHOW ABOUT LESBIANS LIVING IN A GAY HOTSPOT IN FLORIDA???? ALL LESBIANS?????
OH WOW THIS IS BEAUTIFUL
YALL THERES MORE
They’re both so pretty
i dont think tme people get, or ever will get, how deeply affecting the experience of transmisogyny is. will elaborate later.
okay I drank more coffee and I'm ready to get into this.
so transmisogyny is the intersection of transphobia and misogyny, which should be obvious but some people don't like to listen. its another layer of oppression past the transphobia that transmascs have. every transfemme I've talked to and befriended has had some experience with feeling predatory for having feelings for someone (generally affects trans wlw more) or infantilized themselves and acted very gentle and passive in order to not feel as though they're predatory. (I'm still working through the first one and used to deal with the latter)
we're taught to be afraid of our own bodies, especially our genitals. it's as if we're monsters for being women born with penises, as if that in itself makes us gross. there's a reason that all the transphobic bathroom arguments come down to a "man dressed as a woman" preying on women. this goes a million times as far for black trans women, who have the added intersection of blackness. that paints them as even more masculine and aggressive despite how far that is from the truth.
I developed my eating disorder because i felt like my body was too big and masculine, that i would look more feminine if i were skinnier. thats obviously something cis women face, but its not the same for us. we're told we have male bodies and that we need to make ourselves smaller to fit in with "real women".
we're excluded from women's spaces for "not having the same experiences" or "invading" or whatever other transphobic reterric they want to use to allow trans men in but not us. we're alienated from trans/LGBT spaces due to the heavy focus on transmasc and tme nonbinary people in discussions of transitioning. for every 20 resources on how to bind and its dangers i get on my dash, I see 1 or 2 on tucking and its dangers. for every 20 binder giveaways i see I've never seen a gaff giveaway. I bet some of you don't even know what a gaff is. (its what we use to tuck)
the amount of times I've seen jokes about men in dresses, the amount of times i've heard words like femboy and tranny thrown around by tme people as if they're not harming us by doing so sickens me. every time you make genderbent fan art, draw a guy looking embarassed in a dress, or make a femboy friday joke, you are contributing to the stigma that follows us wherever we go.
I'm probably gonna lose followers for this and get told in the notes "I would reblog this but your tone is so aggressive :/" but I DON'T CARE. WE USED OUR POLITE VOICES AND YOU DIDN'T LISTEN. BLACK TRANS WOMEN BUILT THIS COMMUNITY AND NOW THEY'RE DYING ON THE FUCKING STREETS. WE AS A GROUP, ARE BEING TURNED AWAY FROM HOMELESS SHELTERS AND BEING JOKED ABOUT ON THIS AWFUL WEBSITE. IT'S OUR BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS.
Not to mention the fact that people barely understand anything about our transitions. I almost never see any kind of informative posts about what to expect from hormones/surgery/etc., and even the doctors that prescribe my meds hardly seem to know anything about them. The six page long informed consent document I had to sign to get my hormones listed like a hundred possible effects, all of which came with a “this may or may not happen we’re just kinda guessing” disclaimer, and I’ve STILL found TONS of things that no one EVER told me while they were busy stressing over and over that I’d probably be sterile after a while.
Did you know it’s not uncommon to lose a shoe size or two? Or to shrink a couple inches because your entire pelvis rotates after a while (which hurts like a motherfucker, I might add)? Or that it’s very possible that you’ll suffer some of the symptoms of PMS every month even though you can’t menstruate? Did you know your tastes in food might change because your sense of smell changes? Probably not, because barely anybody researches or published information on this stuff. And who even fucking knows what you can expect after surgery because hearsay reports vary wildly and there’s basically nothing out there.
It gets so much harder to stay healthy when it’s so hard to find information on how our bodies function.
reblog this version actually
REBLOG TO MIRACULOUSLY PASS YOUR EXAMS!!
Fair point. Back in the 90s, Clinton had an aggressive plan for the “National Infrastructure Initiative”.
Verizon, AT&T, BellSouth, CenturyLink and others got $200 Billion in funding, plus tax breaks, favorable changes to laws, and other perks in exchange for a commitment to upgrade the telecommunications infrastructure across the nation to all neighborhoods rich and poor.
Specifically there was supposed to be fiberoptic lines run to every house capable of running at least 50mpbs up and down and up to 500 channels of video costing the average consumer around $50/month. This fiberoptic system was by law supposed to be open to ALL competitors and not be a Comcast owned set of wires or a Time Warner set of wires. This was written to PREVENT area based monopolies and allow everyone to access a “free open market” of service providers.
There were even specific deadlines and goals to reach by state. At least 50% of Pennsylvania households were to be hooked up to this fiberoptic system by 2004. At least 75% of New Jersey by 2005….
Then the telecommunications industry came back and said, “Hey… Look theres been a lot of mergers and acquisitions going on so no one really knows where the money is anymore, not to mention price increases all around…. Give us ANOTHER $200 Billion so we can finish.”
All told, the direct payments, tax incentives, regulation cuts, etc have cost the US almost $5 TRILLION since the 90s.
Do you have fiberoptic internet in your house? Do you have a market of internet service providers competing to provide high speed service to your home? Do you pay less than $50/month for your TV and Internet service?
No?
Then you see that the telecom industry has not fulfilled their side of the bargain and have earned the penalties that are coming their way.
If you paid someone to build a house on land that you own, you wouldn’t keep paying the builders rent as if they were your landlord. You might hire them for routine maintenance if they did a good job though. That’s your monthly bill, routine maintenance of a system that we the people are supposed to own.
Nationalize all telecommunications infrastructure. We paid for it, they were just the contractors who built it and never left. They did a shitty job, never met any of their deadlines, and THEY DONT OWN IT.
I remember last year there was a post that was really excited about the concept of community-created, community-run and community-owned internet and how simple it is and projects creating it in working class Detroit neighborhoods (much more exciting and empowering than internet owned and run by a neoliberal surveillance state IMO) but now these telecom corporate lobbyists have funneled their vast resources to roadblocking it or making community internet illegal in 26 states
For some time now, I’ve been convinced the pharmaceutical industry has had the capability to develop treatments for major health problems like cancer and Alzheimer’s. Now here’s some evidence suggesting this is true.
It’s absolutely insane that people believe privatized health care is the best approach for the U.S.
What the HELL?
Capitalism is a curse.
