That's So Röntgen

Congratulations to The Register for what might be my favorite coverage of the indictment.

Wait, the closing paragraphs are pretty strong, too.

If you call me an abomination, I will look for comfort in your other monsters

Continually astonished at how controversial it is to say that a system that requires perpetual growth isn’t sustainable on a finite planet.

"I hate reality just as much as the next guy, but it's still the only place to get a decent meal"

- Groucho Marx

characters who arent canonically gay but whose behavior just makes no sense unless you read them as gay

keep seeing Temu ads on here so just to share cause idk if people are widely aware

HELLO CAN YOU GUYS HEAR ME!!!!! "GENDER IDENTITY IS REAL"

never thought I’d find myself retrospectively wishing my puberty had additional lore but here we are

Conservatives don't have any defense for their kids when it comes to actual groomers/rapists.

They can't criticize the church because then all their Old Testament homophobia takes a hit.

Conservatives would rather protect their homophobia than their kids.

walking up to a butch in a bar and really clicking and then learning that she views herself as having masc qualities to her gender so i rip up my lesbian card (handed to us by the lesbian government and enforced by the lesbian police, or course) and shoot myself in the head

“lesbians cannot experience attraction to:” some of you have never seen a gay ass twink across the street who you thought was a cute girl

i guess what i don’t get about this, either, is how are you going to enforce this, outside of the concept of validity and realness- two entirely nebulous and subjective concepts. “lesbians cannot be attracted to x” ok, so what? there are lesbians out there who are attracted to x. what are you going to do? claim they are not valid? they are not real lesbians? what after that? what are you going to do about this at all? why should… anyone care about your view of what makes a lesbian “valid” or “real” . what even is validity? why does it matter? it all seems so worthless and tiring. how are you going to stop anyone from being a lesbian.

Hey, if you're wanting to make some changes to how you eat, remember- it's much easier, healthier, and more sustainable to ADD foods that make you feel good than it is to REMOVE foods.

If you feel like you don't drink enough non-sugary fluids, it makes more sense to try drinking more tea and sparkling water than it does to just avoid soda. You gotta add in the good (and remember, that the only value food has is how it makes YOU feel. Food is morally nuetral and should be enjoyed.)

Try:

Remember- food is a gift. It should bring you joy, not stress. Trust your body. Enjoy the cookie. Drink something tasty.

So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

Similarily: “Dyke/butch/femme are lesbian words, bisexual/pansexual women shouldn’t use them.”

When I speak to them, lesbians who say this seem to be under the impression that bisexuals must have our own history and culture and words that are all perfectly nice, so why can’t we just use those without poaching someone else’s?

And often, they’re really shocked when I tell them: We don’t. We can’t. I’d love to; it’s not possible.

“Lesbian” used to be a word that simply meant a woman who loved other women. And until feminism, very, very few women had the economic freedom to choose to live entirely away from men. Lesbian bars that began in the 1930s didn’t interrogate you about your history at the door; many of the women who went there seeking romantic or sexual relationships with other women were married to men at the time. When The Daughters of Bilitis formed in 1955 to work for the civil and political wellbeing of lesbians, the majority of its members were closeted, married women, and for those women, leaving their husbands and committing to lesbian partners was a risky and arduous process the organization helped them with. Women were admitted whether or not they’d at one point truly loved or desired their husbands or other men–the important thing was that they loved women and wanted to explore that desire.

Lesbian groups turned against bisexual and pansexual women as a class in the 1970s and 80s, when radical feminists began to teach that to escape the Patriarchy’s evil influence, women needed to cut themselves off from men entirely. Having relationships with men was “sleeping with the enemy” and colluding with oppression. Many lesbian radical feminists viewed, and still view, bisexuality as a fundamentally disordered condition that makes bisexuals unstable, abusive, anti-feminist, and untrustworthy.

(This despite the fact that radical feminists and political lesbians are actually a small fraction of lesbians and wlw, and lesbians do tend, overall, to have positive attitudes towards bisexuals.)

That process of expelling bi women from lesbian groups with immense prejudice continues to this day and leaves scars on a lot of bi/pan people. A lot of bisexuals, myself included, have an experience of “double discrimination”; we are made to feel unwelcome or invisible both in straight society, and in LGBT spaces. And part of this is because attempts to build a bisexual/pansexual community identity have met with strong resistance from gays and lesbians, so we have far fewer books, resources, histories, icons, organizations, events, and resources than gays and lesbians do, despite numerically outnumbering them..

So every time I hear that phrase, it’s another painful reminder for me of all the experiences I’ve had being rejected by the lesbian community. But bisexual experiences don’t get talked about or signalboosted much,so a lot of young/new lesbians literally haven’t learned this aspect of LGBT+ history.

And once I’ve explained it, I’ve had a heartening number of lesbians go, “That’s not what I wanted to happen, so I’m going to stop saying that.”

This is good information for people who carry on with the “queer is a slur” rhetoric and don’t comprehend the push back.

ive been saying for years that around 10 years ago on tumblr, it was only radfems who were pushing the queer as slur rhetoric, and everyone who was trans or bi or allies to them would push back - radfems openly admitted that the reason they disliked the term “queer” was because it lumped them in with trans people and bi women. over the years, the queer is a slur rhetoric spread in large part due to that influence, but radfems were more covert about their reasons - and now it’s a much more prevalent belief on tumblr - more so than on any queer space i’ve been in online or offline - memory online is very short-term unfortunately bc now i see a lot of ppl, some of them bi or trans themselves, who make this argument and vehemently deny this history but…yep

Or asexuality, which has been a concept in discussions on sexuality since 1869. Initially grouped slightly to the left, as in the categories were ‘heterosexual’, ‘homosexual’, and ‘monosexual’ (which is used differently now, but then described what we would call asexuality). Later was quite happily folded in as a category of queerness by Magnus Hirschfeld and Emma Trosse in the 1890s, as an orientation that was not heterosexuality and thus part of the community.

Another good source here, also talking about aromanticism as well. Aspec people have been included in queer studies as long as queer studies have existed.

Also, just in my own experiences, the backlash against ‘queer’ is still really recent. When I was first working out my orientation at thirteen in 2000, there was absolutely zero issue with the term. I hung out on queer sites, looked for queer media, and was intrigued by queer studies. There were literally sections of bookstores in Glebe and Newtown labelled ‘Queer’. It was just… there, and so were we!

So it blows my mind when there are these fifteen-year-olds earnestly telling me - someone who’s called themself queer longer than they’ve been alive - that “que*r is a slur.” Unfortunately, I have got reactive/defensive for the same reasons OP has mentioned. I will absolutely work on biting down my initial defensiveness and trying to explain - in good faith - the history of the word, and how it’s been misappropriated and tarnished by exclusionists.

Worth noting here is a sneaky new front I’ve seen radfems start using:

Yeah, okay, maybe older LGBTs use queer and fag and dyke…but they’re cringey, and you don’t want to be cringe, do you?

I’m not even joking. They strip the loud-and-proud aspects of our history out of all context, remove every bit of blood, sweat, and tears the queer community poured into things like anti-discrimination laws and AIDS research funding, and use those screams of rebellion to say we’re weird, and you wouldn’t want to be WEIRD.

Stop and think about that for a minute.

Yeah. They are not the arbiters of our community and they never were, and it’s important to not give them the time of day.

When I say “Queer history” I am including despite it all, the stupid radfems who still haven’t understood they are deepthroating the patriarchy they claim hating.

Also do not listen to radfems either. If one day for example one of them who has been loud about their hate for weird “queers” folks who give a bad rep to the community. Dare reveal she likes women, have no fear. She will be treated like the rest of us by the system, that’s the part they tend to desire forget.

That at the end of the day. They are just another queer person passing by this world that has ostracized them, and their way to cope with this reality is litterally to create this complete delusion that if they behave normal enough and punish the weird ones, they will get a reward of some sort.

The truth is they will get bashed and kill like any of the weird queers they claim to hate. They are like the rest of us but have no desire understanding this simple truth. Just like the replies before, it’s better to just ignore them. They are the puritans of our community frankly.

Every queer person deserves to have their right respected. You have the right to hate that person for their opinion but hating on their sexuality is litterally playing in the system’s hand.

Anyway. Get queer kid, make them tremble with fear. Some of you do sound like your parent’s birthed you from theur butthole with how much shit you can spew per minute but I’ll be damned to respect my opinion before I respect your person.

I never go on twitter (because, you know, it’s twitter) but I just had a look at it to check up on Hank and I’m glad to see he’s being *extremely* Hank about this

not just ‘he would not fucking say that’ but ‘he would not, under torture, admit that’

oh you’re insufferable? *suffers you easily and gladly*

kitten

man. what on earth.

ok i flipped it. sorry

i think rickrolling is the only meme that gets objectively funnier with age. in 2009 you learned to anticipate it but in 2019 it happens just infreqently enough that i fall for it every single time

like people still make rage comics and doge jokes and shit but it’s always ironic (the real punchline is that you’re using an outdated format) or more in line with modern absurd internet humor. rickrolling is the only meme i can think of that’s been the exact same for a full decade- click on a link thinking you’re getting something else, get rick astley instead, and it’s still consistently funny

the more time passes the more foolish you feel for falling for a rickroll as well. Like darn I learnt about this prank 10+ years ago how did I just fall for it now,

Plus, as far as memes go, turns out it’s still incredibly popular 

Nooope. Nope, you can’t get me. I’m not clicking on that link and you can’t make me.

I am a fool for clicking

it’s honestly so, so fascinating—here’s a graph I found that estimates how many people have been rickrolled in the past decade!

monoculture forests are deeply unsettling in a way that is hard to explain to people who do not spend a lot of time looking at forests

this thing is alive in an undead hivemind kind of way and it wants to fucking kill me

this literally looks like a poorly designed video game