Fifteen Minutes To Fame

There is more oppression to go around than privilege.

(Source: calecake)

[TW: Cissexism, rape, child abuse] Every time I hear a song by Otep anymore, i think of this post she made in 2009 

amydentata:

blackenedbutterfly:

boiiing:

fearfaerie:

{TW: cissexism}

http://blurt-online.com/blogs/view/2983/

here’s a nice little snippet of it.

“In order to legally (and morally) marry the woman I love - I have no other choice but to …become A MAN.

Yes, sexual-reassignment surgery.
No, I am not kidding.
I am buying a penis. A real one.

Oh, how I will miss my magnificent breasts and elegant vagina!”

“With a little money (and a lot of medicine) a Gay woman can surgically become a Man and LEGALLY marry her Lesbian fiancé.”

and basically she goes on to make light of the struggles of trans people and write it off as “gay people who just want to get married”

and vagina = woman/penis = man.

(all of which was dismissed as “satire” and people who were offended by it were called “intellectually inferior”)

No matter what Otep says, I will always love her. She’s involved with idiotic people like PETA, and she is a manhater, but these are all things that I ignore about her because I know that being repeatedly raped by your father when you’re a small child fucks you up for the rest of your life sometimes.

I don’t think that really absolves her of cissexism and ableism…

Seriously, it doesn’t. I was raped repeatedly by my father and I have somehow managed to not be a cissexist douche (and I’m working on my ableism though I know I have a ways to go still).

That might be because I’m trans and disabled, but you know whaaaaaaat? Cissexism and ableism aren’t caused by rape. They’re caused by systems of oppression embedded into our culture. Rape’s got nothing to do with it. Child abuse has got nothing to do with it. If she’s not working on these things, it’s because of privilege and/or willful ignorance. Not rape.

Every time I see people absolving other people of being oppressive or horrible because of something oppressive or horrible that they experience/d, I want to die inside.  Because what that says is that people really don’t want social justice, they don’t want oppression and horrible things to no longer happen.  They just want to be able to justify them.

(Source: strawberryfaerie)

Hint to Social Justice types

When trying to point out how people are oppressing you, try to not downplay the oppressions those people face and/or use oppression against them.  Doing so makes you a douche.

12 year old to receive life sentence?

youarenotyou:

newwavefeminism:

midwestmountainmama:

hupsoonheng:

esmeweatherwax:

martaunderthesea:

Cristian Fernandez is only 12 years old. And if Florida prosecutor Angela Corey has her way, he’ll never leave jail again.

Cristian hasn’t had an easy life. He’s the same age now as his mother was when he was born. He’s a survivor of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. In 2010, Cristian watched his stepfather commit suicide to avoid being charged with abusing Cristian.

Last January, Cristian was wrestling with his 2-year-old brother, David, and accidentally broke David’s leg. Despite this, their mother left Cristian with his brother again in March. While the two boys were alone, Cristian allegedly pushed his brother against a bookcase, and David sustained a head injury. After their mother returned home, she waited six hours before taking David to the hospital. David eventually died.

Now Cristian is being charged with first degree murder — as an adult. He’s the youngest person in the history of his Florida county to receive this charge, and his next hearing is scheduled for tomorrow.

Melissa Higgins works with kids who get caught up in the criminal justice system in her home state of New Hampshire. When she read about Cristian’s case, she was appalled — so she started a petition on Change.org asking Florida State’s Attorney Angela Corey to try Cristian as a child. Please sign Melissa’s petition immediately before Cristian’s hearing tomorrow.

As part of his prosecution, Cristian has been examined by two different forensic psychiatrists — each of whom concluded that he was “emotionally underdeveloped but essentially reformable despite a tough life.”

Cristian has already been through more than most of us can imagine — and now the rest of his life is in the hands of a Florida prosecutor who wants to make sure Cristian never leaves jail. 

The purpose of the juvenile justice system is to reform kids who haven’t gotten a fair shake. If Cristian is sent to adult prison, it will be more than a tragedy for him — it will also be a signal to other prosecutors that kids’ lives are acceptable collateral in the quest to be seen as “tough on crime.” 

Cristian’s next hearing is in just 24 hours. State’s Attorney Angela Corey needs to know that her actions are being watched — please sign the petition asking her not to try Cristian as an adult:

http://www.change.org/petitions/reverse-decision-to-try-12-yo-cristian-fernandez-as-an-adult

Thanks for being a change-maker,

- Michael and the Change.org team

Shock horror, it’s not a white kid this is happening to. HE’S TWELVE. He should never have been left alone with a toddler, fucking ell.

And his mother waited six hours before taking David to the hospital? A twelve year old abused kid shouldn’t be charged with murder, even if he was being tried as a juvenile, for roughhousing with his brother when he’s too young to supervise younger children, and especially not with a negligent parent like that. 

I’m sorry, but the answer to the unjust horrifically violence “justice” system is NOT to turn the glare of the system on mothers instead of their kids. Do we have any idea why she left him alone? Was it because of the welfare work programs that make it so you can only get money if you work? Was it because she has an untreated mental health issue/addiction? Was it because she said fuck it, haha, I’m going to go sit in this park and let my kid fuck up my other kid? 

And as far as waiting six hours—head injuries are notoriously hard to understand the symptoms to—how many horror stories are there about a person who was “just fine”—and wound up dying three days later from a seemingly not so bad head injury? Natasha Richardson took a not so bad fall on a skying trip and wound up dead. 

I am not defending mothers at the expense of their children’s lives—I’m instead saying that to be poor, to be a woman in an abusive situation, to have “resources” like “keep your legs shut” or “it’s not my job to take care of your brats”—it’s just as much of a tragedy as what is happening to this boy. Because when you fuck around with a mother, when you deny her resources—you are *necessarily* denying her children resources. A part of making sure bullshit like life imprisonment for a 12 year old doesn’t happen anymore is valuing their youth enough to *empower their caretakers.*

all of this. even the original Change.org letter sorta kinda threw the mother under the bus in a way that makes me uncomfortable. If we’re going to fight for change and justice than we need to make sure we acknowledge ALL of the institutional factors at play in the lives of the people we’re fighting for.

yes, this commentary

(via bubonickitten)

Since I’m not good at the meme stuff, this is all text.

Get recommended as someone to follow for social justice stuff.

Freak out that I now have to stop posting nude and sex pics and start saying lots more thoughtful, serious stuff.

I love anxiety.

Why does this even need to be said.

droppingthefbomb:

You do not get to decide how a community is allowed to respond to their own oppression.

The cis woman I mentioned earlier who told me I have never been trans was also pulling this on me.

(via kiriamaya)

Why I Care About Social Justice: An Essay

fussykitty:

I don’t want to be an asshole.

(Source: dualitier, via oldchristinathena)

a rebuttal.

torayot:

goaquatic:

hupsoonheng:

lakalenyu:

hupsoonheng:

islovethelaw:

I used to be involved with the social justice circles on tumblr, but I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with them. I am a liberal who believes in love, peace, and equality; I was attracted to social justice because I believe that every human being deserves respect.

But sometimes I find myself asking: where the hell is the love and respect? Between furious memes, long lists of bizarre privileges and oppressions, nit-picking for linguistic perfection, angry name-calling for the smallest slip-up and people raging against each other and their own friends and parents for not being up-to-date with the newest language and theory of social justice, I feel like there’s far more hatred, negativity and exclusivity than anything else in the social justice community. It’s not just the online community, either, but the liberal circles I hang out with in my neighbourhood and college. 

I’m seeing positive efforts maligned everywhere - telling women not to be ashamed of their periods is cissexist, spreading body love is ableist, fighting for same-sex marriage rights is heteronormative and even the attempts to fight LGBT suicides with “It Gets Better” are privileged - and I wonder: what can we do? Can I love my chubbier-than-the-ideal body without deriding others for their thin privilege? Can I be proud of the ‘oppressed’ half of my heritage without being ashamed of ‘passing’ for a white Anglo-Saxon? Can I, a bisexual woman, fight for my right to marry a woman should I chose to without being torn apart for buying into an oppressive paradigm? Can I study European history without being ‘eurocentric’ or foreign history without being ‘appropriative’? Can I criticize pornography and raunch culture without being a ‘slut-shamer’ or a ‘whorephobic’? Is love, respect, and acceptance simply not enough? 

Because it seems to me, that to be accepted in the social justice community,  I would have to declare myself ‘femmey androgyne genderqueer’ rather than ‘woman’ for my propensity to both wear lipstick and shop in the men’s section, be ‘queer as fuck’ rather than ‘bisexual’ lest I exclude those outside the gender binary, refuse to identify with the ‘privileged’ part of my heritage and stomp upon my white ancestors, and reject most of my friends as ‘douchefucks’ lest they let a non-PC word slip out of their mouths. 

I don’t even know where I’m going with this, but I’m just putting it out here. Maybe I have the right idea, or maybe I’m a privileged douchefuck who needs to find her way. Tell me what you think. 

the usual whiny ‘i don’t wanna comprehend’ bullshit

how come it’s usually this shit instead of any real critiques of social justice

Can I love my chubbier-than-the-ideal body without deriding others for their thin privilege?

lol is this about me or am i just bein arrogant in the loopy wee hours

i am tired of oversimplification being used as an excuse to dismiss all parts of a movement

i am tired of generalizations and misinformation and outright lies

people like stfusocialjusticeassholes—who the fuck are you fighting for? what exactly are you calling people out on? you have no real critiques of any movements, and you and others like you deride others’ legitimate critiques as ‘divisive’. you’re just defensive, and instead of facing it you channel it into obstruction of education, and further shitting on those who have already been shat upon enough. 

stop it. there is nothing edgy or wonderful or new about your views. if they were new, then maybe we wouldn’t all be here having all these fucking arguments over and over and over again. 

don’t mind me just bolding all of hups’s commentary forever, nbd.

i rly have no patience for this “but y u so mad” mindset. frankly, i wanna know why you’re not mad, op. there’s a fuckload to be mad about and it’s plain naive to imply otherwise.

idk, i cannot address this post in its entirety w/ this monstrous headache of mine but i do want to touch on a couple things before i bow the fuck out and sleep for all the hours.

and even the attempts to fight LGBT suicides with “It Gets Better” are privileged

where are you coming from that the intent of the “it gets better” campaign counts for anything when in reality it’s pretty fuckin token and stands to cause as much if not more harm than good? b/c if we assume it’s just gonna get better for kids, based on the experiences of a privileged few (overwhelmingly white, abled and possessing a certain elevated degree of class status), we kind of wash our hands of any responsibility to make shit better for them now. yeah, it’s easy to throw up a video on youtube being like “keep on keepin’ on, queer kids! shit’s gonna fuckin get better for you!” but investing the time to tear down the system that puts our community’s kids in such grave risk in the first fuckin place is a little harder, esp. when it means taking a hard look at how our own behaviors contribute to that system. no one should have to wait for life to be liveable, telling them to hang in there b/c it will, not might, but will, get better is super disingenuous, esp. when for some, it plain won’t get better. ever.

refuse to identify with the ‘privileged’ part of my heritage and stomp upon my white ancestors

first, take privileged out of scare quotes. second, i’m gonna tell you what i told my mom when she started crying over how i had ~abandoned~ my white heritage and took no pride in it like i do my native heritage: ain’t nobody trying to take being white away from me. i don’t have to fight for my white legitimacy, and no one is going to shame me, on an institutional level, for being part white. i have never had to scrape and dig and scavenge just to piece together a white identity, i never had to argue w/ anyone convinced that i couldn’t be white b/c all white ppl are extinct, i never had to read history books that glossed over the attempted genocide of my white ancestors and then dedicated whole chapters to how sweet and well-meaning and industrious and revolutionary their murderers were, or hear someone write off my white ancestors as no good savage drunks who had it coming.

go ahead and take pride in your white heritage and honor your white ancestors b/c there is literally no one stopping you. there is no fight in being proud of being white. you don’t have to scream and holler that you are proud of your whiteness, despite all the efforts to shame you for it, to breed it out of you, to forcibly erase it from social consciousness. fuck.

I would have to declare myself ‘femmey androgyne genderqueer’ rather than ‘woman’ for my propensity to both wear lipstick and shop in the men’s section

no, you would have to declare yourself a femme androgyne genderqueer if that was, indeed, your gender identity. seriously, could we not act like being genderqueer is just something ladies do for brownie points in social justice circles? b/c that’s how this sounds. like you would HAVE to claim genderqueerness to occupy social justice spaces unharassed which, i mean, have you been in most feminist spaces lately? cuz they’re pretty overwhelmingly dominated by cis women. you’re really not in the minority here. and my femme nonbinary ass thanks you to not treat my gender identity is any less legit, or more sj-brownie-point-earning, than “woman.”

be ‘queer as fuck’ rather than ‘bisexual’ lest I exclude those outside the gender binary

if you’re only attracted to two genders, then you’re bisexual. those genders, i take it, are male and female in your case. cool, fine. nothing wrong with that. i rly fail to see what the issue is unless you’re trying to imply that “bisexual” should adequately encompass more than two gender identities cuz, uh, it doesn’t? how you self-label is your own business, and i’m not about to shame you for it. i mean, if i was personally with someone who id’d as bisexual and was only attracted to men and women and thought that that label indeed encompassed their attraction to me, i’d probably stop being with that person fairly fucking quick.

Can I, a bisexual woman, fight for my right to marry a woman should I chose to without being torn apart for buying into an oppressive paradigm?

uh, yeah? by being rly super aware that marriage is a fucked up, oppressive institution as it currently stands. that we rly need to overhaul how we conceptualize marriage as a society as well as the exclusivity of the rights we’ve attached to it. marriage is fucked up, and we need to do something about that. and i’m still going to marry my chosen person one of these days.

where the hell is the love and respect?

i ask myself this every time a so-called ally has a tantrum over a call-out, or when folks make passive-aggressive posts about how fucking mean us oppressed ppl are. when ppl tell me my anger is displaced and i will accomplish nothing if i don’t calm down already and be sensible about this, like being angry is something that i do for the lulz, to pass the time.

i don’t like to be angry. i don’t want to feel that hot rage that starts in my gut and spreads all through my limbs, ping-ponging through my veins, making me feel like there’s no fucking blood in my body, just fury every fucking time a core aspect of my identity is reduced to a joke, or a bid for attention, or a costume. something dismissible and consumable and subhuman. i don’t like being angry, i would like not to be angry, but it’s not a switch you can just turn off b/c when i stop being angry about genocide, erasure, ongoing violence, police that don’t care, allies that don’t care, staggering rates of sickness and death and rape in my communities, when i just stop being angry about all of those things without anything having changed about them, without any genuine progress having been made aside from token, ineffectual efforts, all that is left for me is sadness and resignation. the knowledge that nothing will ever change and no one will ever care and there is literally no use fighting for basic human rights for ppl like me b/c all the majority has to offer me is apathy.

and i refuse to fucking feel like that. b/c feeling that way will literally kill me.

so i’m sorry that it hurts you that ppl are mad in the social justice sphere, that we are angry, and harsh and we care deeply, passionately, angrily, about stuff you don’t seem to think is worth getting upset about. i’m sorry that taking issue w/ oppressive language seems to you nitpicky and unnecessary and just looking for shit to be mad about. i’m sorry that if a positive effort only actually helps a very few while the rest of us are left in the lurch, and we dare to take issue w/ that, we’re being ungrateful or something.

every human being does deserve respect. what’s more, we all deserve the same amount of respect.

so when the majority of the world starts showing me some, stops acting like my gender is just special snowflakeism, my brain defective, wrong, and something to be fixed, and my indigenous heritage alternately nonexistent, shameful, or a totally wicked frat party theme just waiting to happen, we can all share in the mutual love and respect and i’ll stop being so gosh darn angry b/c i will no longer have something to be angry about.

don’t mind me just reblogging L’s amazing rebuttal of all the bullshit forever, nbd

Reblogging for amazing BAMF commentary. <3

oh hullo, what’s this, someone just go told~

Bam.