How Anti-trans Bills Also Target Intersex Kids In Texas

The Republican attacks against trans kids all over the US is often presented as “protecting kids”. Some of the anti-trans laws reveal what is really taking place: This is all about forcing kids to live up to the strict and narrow ideals of right wing extremists. They are all for surgery and hormone treatments, if they can be used to turn intersex kids into people they consider “normal”.

Intersex is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male.

Sara Willa Ernst talked to Alicia Roth Weigel, an intersex advocate and member of Austin’s Human Rights Commission:

The bills seek to ban health care services like puberty blockers, hormone therapy and surgeries for trans kids. But how would that affect intersex kids?

Read the whole article here!

Photo of Alicia Roth Weigel at the Texas State Capitol Rotunda.

also it really takes the fear out of getting older when you realize that society has collapsed and we are no longer obligated, nor should we even be expected, to settle into Serious Adults in business suits with steady office jobs and 2.8 kids. there’s nothing to stop us from just gradually becoming more eccentric with each decade. we may not have retirement plans but we can plan to gradually evolve into the 80s van wizards our parents were too cowardly to become.

The spiritual successor to Miette

Might I also add

May i add the piece from artist Verbal Vomit

Glad to see we’re all in agreement that cats talk like disparaged victorian children

I am so incredibly glad we finally moved on from "i can has". Cats are clearly smart enough for advanced sentence structure and dumb enough to draw entirely incorrect conclusions about what they're talking about.

My cat, banging the cabnet door over and over and over: bang bang bang

Me: you will not earn what you desire by banging the cabinet door.

My cat: This is a test of wills, is it not? We shall see if your ability to put up with my incessant banging outlasts my eternal lust for snackie treats. Years of conditioning have hardened me for this purpose. bang bang bang

Me: ksst!

My cat, throwing herself to the ground like she's been shot: Oh! Oh I have been assailed in my own home! Have mercy, have pity! Surely in the cruel darkness of your heart there is some mote of goodness that might stay your hand! Do not strike me, I pray you!

Me: ok

My cat, after waiting about 3 minutes: bang bang bang

Can haz snackytreat

(source)

Source

This post is the most reblogged post of the year! Congratulations!

Woohoo, way to go Miette!

@sadamericanorca

This is so good. Makes me feel like I'm really helping.

Which I need, because this kind of sucks.

If you're staying home during #Quarantine2020 you're helping make things better than they would be otherwise

For anyone else really feeling the effects of wide-scale gaslighting, feeling like you’re totally insane for still staying home while everyone else tries to go back to normal:

You’re not insane, you are doing the right thing. Please keep doing it. I love you.

when christian artists change the line in hallelujah from “maybe there’s a God above” to “I know that there’s a God above” >:c

#idk why i’m so unreasonably angry#maybe cuz it’s my fav line

it’s also because Leonard COHEN (!) was Jewish and this is a quintessentially Jewish line, and changing it to that level of Annoying Certainty is stripping it of its Jewish meaning and imbuing it with that particularly American smug evangelical Christian attitude that makes me tired, so very tired

THAT IS EXACTLY WHY

I don’t think I’ve heard any cover artist sing my favorite verses You say I took the name in vain I don’t even know the name But if I did, well really, what’s it to you? There’s a blaze of light In every word It doesn’t matter which you heard The holy or the broken Hallelujah I did my best, it wasn’t much I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you And even though It all went wrong I’ll stand before the Lord of Song With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

um woah

I will always hit the reblog button so hard for Hallelujah but ESPECIALLY mentions of the elusive final verses which are just about my favorite lyrics ever. Why do people always omit the best part of the song??

In Yiddish

In Hebrew

In Ladino

Yeah, I wonder why the verses that reference specific Jewish mystical and chassidic concepts that aren’t readily understood by American “I love Jews, you know, Jesus was Jewish!” Christians never get any airtime. Funny that.

You say I took the name in vain I don’t even know the name But if I did, well really, what’s it to you? There’s a blaze of light In every word It doesn’t matter which you heard The holy or the broken Hallelujah

These are specifically about Chassidic Jewish theories of the holy language, how each letter and combination of letters in Hebrew contains the essence of the divine spark and if used correctly, can unlock or uncover the divine spark in the mundane material word. And of course, there are secret names of God which, when spoken by any ordinary human would kill them, but if you are worthy and holy and righteous can be used to perform miracles or even to behold the glory of God face-to-face. The words themselves have power. Orthodox Jews often won’t even pronounce the word “hallelujah” in it’s entirety in conversation, because the “yah” sound at the end is a True Name of God (there are hundreds, supposedly) and thus too holy to say outside of prayer.

None of this is to mention how David’s sin in sleeping with Batshevah (the subject of much of the song, with a brief deviation to Shimshon and Delilah) is considered the turning point in the Tanach that ultimately dooms the Davidic line at the cosmological level and thus dooms Jewish sovereignty and independence altogether. From a Christian perspective this led to Jesus, the King of Kings, and that’s all very well and good for them, but for the Jews, the Davidic line never returned and is the central tragedy of the total arc of the Torah. Like, our Bible doesn’t have a happy ending? And that’s what this song is about? There’s no Grace - you just have to sit with the sin and its consequence.

Of course, Cohen is referencing all of this ironically, and personalizing these very high-level religious concepts. Like the point of this song is that Cohen, the songwriter, is identifying with David, the psalmist, and identifying his own sins with David’s. The ache that you hear in this song is that the two thousand year exile that resulted from one wrong night of passion and Cohen feels that the pain he has caused to his lover is of equally monumental infamy. Basically, in a certain light, the whole of Psalms is a vain effort for David to atone for his sin and I think Cohen was writing this song in wonderment that David could eternally praise the God who would not forgive him and would force him and his people into exile. But he ultimately gets how you have to surrender to the inexorable force of God in the face of your own inadequacies and how to surrender is to worship and to worship is to praise - hence, Hallelujah. You can either do the right thing and worship God from the start, or you can fuck up, be punished, and thus be forced to beg for His forgiveness. It’s the terrible inevitability of praise that’s driving him mad.

Like honestly, I identify with this song so strongly as an off-the-derech Jew, I sometimes wonder what Christians can possibly hear in this song, as it speaks so specifically to the sadomasochistic relationship that a lapsed Jew has with their God. It’s such a different song from a Christian theological perspective it’s almost unrecognizable, man. This song continues to be a wonder of postmodern Jewish theology and sexuality from start to finish. Don’t let anyone give you any “Judeo-Christian” narishkeit. This is a Jewish song.

(Sorry about the wild tangent it’s just 2AM and I love this song so dang much, you guys.)

holy shit. woah.

This.

That last bit from @stoneandbloodandwater, that’s a great articulation of the well of feeling, memory, storytelling, and culture packed into one of the most Jewish songs ever to get real famous. The song is both surrender and defiance, and that those are actually a single path together, not two opposite choices.

A small addition: This song is such a deeply resonant Jewish touchstone that every synagogue I have ever attended uses its melody in services from time to time.

It is so important, so powerful, so spiritually resonant that we use it in prayer.

If memory serves me, the cover we most often hear came about specifically because Jeff Buckley was like “man, this song is badass but I don’t know that I can do its concepts justice” and Leonard Cohen was like “you need different verses? Here, I wrote over eighty of the fuckers, pick what you want to use” and so Buckley put together verses that spoke to him as a non-Jew about sexuality and this idea of a failed relationship.

Which wouldn’t be an issue if Christians didn’t then take his adaptation (done, I emphasize again, with Cohen’s blessing) and rewrite it in ways THAT DO NOT COME FROM THE ORIGINAL VERSES.

Yes, this.

[Image description] get comfortable saying: 1. thanks for correcting me. i didn't realize that. 2. i hadn't thought of it like that. i understand now. 3. i was wrong about that, and i've changed my mind. 4. i should do some more research before i argue this point. there's no shame in being wrong, only refusing to learn. -@the.foreward [End ID]

constantly fascinated by the way tumblrs plans for this website have nothing to do with the people who use it

tumblr users: complain

staff: 

Hello! Hello! You’re correct! I’m your resident digital marketing pro here to spit some theory on why this is actually not the most grossly incompetent site you’ve ever seen, it’s just that Yahoo (and we) don’t know it!

Exhibit A: Yahoo paid $1.1 Billion for Tumblr in 2013

Tumblr was already the way tumblr is in varying degrees of appalling before 2013. So. Yahoo bought it even after it was plateauing. The truth of the matter is that Yahoo bought tumblr to be another social media site, a mixture of Deviantart and Livejournal. They did this because they didn’t understand tumblr’s true value, which doesn’t have to do with traffic ads at all!

Exhibit B: Automattic paid less than (but conceivably close to) $20 Million for Tumblr in 2019

Automattic owns Wordpress and has a bunch of other smaller-name properties under its umbrella. It’s a company that is ‘trying to make the web a better place’ and honestly we should have let Pornhub buy Tumblr BUT I DIGRESS. Automattic bought Tumblr for multiple millions of dollars in 2019 because they knew what Yahoo did not: That tumblr’s value isn’t ads but in fact Big Data. 

Big Data, n., definition: extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions.

Tumblr is a trend hub, a place where twitter jokes show up months in advance, where pop culture phenomenon are born and where meme trends appear before anywhere else. It’s self contained and pretty appalling but it’s one of the only sites where ‘discoverable’ content is still a common thing. We’re all using our favorite characters hashtags, communicating via messenger and generally being stupid without the filter of ads and brand accounts. This is a Kodoku of cultural trends and content, a melting pot where the best rises and can easily be observed.

Had you ever seen a gif set before tumblr? Exactly.

Tumblr’s information is what they want, not to sell us anything. They are doing the bare minimum to keep people here, filtering out the spam (porn accounts which aren’t giving them usable data, bots, etc.) and creating a data factory they can apply to their other sites and hopefully get a ringer out of one of them! Wordpress is all about user ease and hosting, but there are a bunch of other sites no one cares about on their homepage, and if Automattic is being smart they’re datamining all that Tumblr does (including UI complaints and Xkit which provides free coding for them BTW) to form roadmaps for their other properties. And probably also selling what they learn (which doesn’t qualify as ‘our data being sold’ btw because it contains no identifying information) to other major corporations and technology companies.

So yes, Tumblr is a hellsite where no one listens to you, but it’s not because they don’t hear. It’s because what you’re asking for won’t feed the beast behind the curtain.

Enjoy your blogs, enjoy your content. Enjoy the unregulated (except for porn because these people are prudes) internet in the last bastion of insanity on the light half of the world wide web. 

Stay where you are, poor beast, this is no world for you. Stay in your forest and keep your trees green, and your friends protected. And good luck to you…for you are the last!

Interesting! I don’t know if it’s correct, but it’s a very plausible explanation for why Tumblr hasn’t been dismantled despite its complete lack of profitability.   It even explains the bizarre, inconsistently displayed advertising on the site: the point is  not to get us to buy anything, but to measure our reactions on the scale from amused tolerance to apathy to frothing, yelling-at-@staff outrage.  

— David Graeber, On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: Broken windows, imaginary jars of urine, and the cosmological role of the police in American culture (via probablyasocialecologist)

this is no joke. i looked around the reviews of several different candles just in case it could’ve been a single bad batch but nope.

these screenshots are only from like 4 or 5 different candles but i could’ve grabbed plenty more.

y’all, seriously, loss of smell is a possible effect of covid. if things don’t smell/taste as strong as you remember GET TESTED and ISOLATE. if someone you know is complaining about their candles not having a scent, inform them and encourage them to get tested. and wear a fucking mask, y’all.

What a fuckin metric to see the disease!

This feels like environmental story telling off a zombie video game

A Twitter user actually did a statistical breakdown of this.

‘a series of unfortunate events’ isn’t even remotely unrealistic because adults really are Like That

i don’t mean to be a huge dick and slather my personal experiences all over everything, but ‘a series of unfortunate events’ truly will validate so many abused kids out there 

the baudelaire children confide in mr. poe that they’re being hurt by count olaf, and mr. poe goes and tells count olaf they said so, and olaf then punishes the children for daring to speak out. that’s real. olaf hits klaus so hard he falls over. that’s real. violet tells mr. poe about the literal abuse olaf subjects them to, and mr. poe dismisses her as a girl griping about chores. that’s real. in this book, children are trod on, disbelieved, laughed at, scorned, punished. that’s real. 

i don’t consider myself an abused child, but i was hit growing up. not often and not hard enough to bruise, but enough that i still, as a nineteen year old college student, flinch and cringe and cry and can’t stand up for myself against anyone; even to this day, i can’t, because i’m still convinced that if i contradict i’ll be screamed at or physically hurt. this stuff lingers. one day i was pushed so hard i fell against my bedframe and got a bloody nose! eventually i got too large to slap, but one day my mom pushed my sister. and then i did something i’d never done before: i decided to tell “a trusted adult.”

this adult essentially told me “if you’re not getting hit so hard you’re being bruised, you’re fine.” and guess what? i never told another adult until one day years later it burst out of me and i absolutely broke down sobbing in the car to my aunt and grandmother. for 20 minutes i couldn’t even stand up.

this is what adults do. ‘a series of unfortunate events’ knows this. it chronicles this. and it is completely fucking unique in the fact that it is on the kids’ side. that, to me, is fucking revolutionary. it takes the harm adults dole out to children daily and says This Is Undeserved and This Is Wrong and This Is Evil. revisiting it as an adult, i see myself echoed in it, and that is so piercing it almost hurts. 

I remember watching the movie and I absolutely loved it, I feel so connected to the children and my mom hated it, she once told me “I don’t like how they portray the adults like they’re dumb” bc she was literally forced to watch the kids side and how everyone ignore them. I told her that was reality and children couldn’t help to see adults at dumbs bc they ignore them thinking they know better.

She didn’t like that very much

I feel like if you vibe to this post, you should consider checking out the works of Diana Wynne Jones, because with very few exceptions (Dark Lord of Derkholm and sequels are the only ones I can think of offhand) all the adults in her books are like this

they are children’s books about the experiences of children who have been abandoned by their parents, one way or another

not be like “ugh the Youths” but i think kids nowadays have gotten Too Comfortable on the internet.

like i see these tweets on twitter like “hey im 14 and i just got kicked out pls rt so i can find somewhere to stay im in x state/city” and like HOLY SHIT i cannot emphasize enough how incredibly dangerous this is. you’re broadcasting to EVERYONE that you are young, vulnerable, and desperate AND information on how to find you!!!! like i know you meant for that to be just for your friends on twitter but that’s a public tweet!!! ANYONE could see it!!! like I saw it and i have no idea who you are you are not in my circle and yet!!! so like WHO ELSE has seen it!!!

This girl on among us have me her number and turns out she’s 13. It was like 3am and she proceeded to tell me the name of her town, what school she went to, both of her parents jobs, how she did in class, what her home life is like, the first names of all of her friends, ect. All of this mostly unprompted. The smartest thing she did was ask to FaceTime me to make sure I ‘wasn’t a 40yo catfish’ and she talked about the other kids that she had met on among us this way.

To any kids out there: I know that quarantine is stressful and we’re all depressed and lonely bu please please please don’t give out your information to strangers on the internet, and if you do there are dozens of safer options than just giving everything to everyone and just hoping for the best

My little sister is 14 and she gave out her information to the wrong person who shared it somewhere and she can now count on two hands the number of teens and young adults who have asked for nudes and favors and personal information. It’s really worsening her anxiety and anorexia so please I’m begging you don’t give out any of your information unless you explicitly trust the person you’re giving it to.

ADHD life hacks #41,279: Vegetable Management

source tweet: X

THIS IS SMART

I'M SORRY, IS THERE AN ACTUAL REASON I DO THIS? WHAT.

my singing voice is good for showers and mornings in the kitchen and drunken nights and lullabies for babies who need sleep and im okay with this

i think it’s silly to be ashamed of your art because it’s not in a museum and of your voice because it’s not selling out stadiums. there will always be people who enjoy and appreciate what you can do.

Idk why but this hit me really hard and I’ve been staring at it for a couple minutes.

Hey remember when US and Russia was all like “We’re the best!!! We’ve won the space race!!!!” But India sent a kick-ass space probe to Mars and the whole mission was fuel efficient, costed less and a roaring success in the first try and then they were like “…..wait no that can’t be true” and still have the audacity to call us “underdeveloped” or only view us as a ‘third world country’? :)

For anyone who needs more info, the probe was called Mangalyaan (which literally means space probe vehicle) or Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) and you can also get more information here and here

Remember when NYT mocked India for this very thing and an TOI (a major indian newspaper) responded with this? :)

They were being racist asf and we were till respectful literally fuck you if you think ‘third world counties’ can’t be better than you

white people can and should reblog this

and shout out to the women engineers integral to the launch

“Indian staff from the Indian Space Research Organisation celebrate after the Mars Orbiter Spacecraft entered Mars’s orbit.

On November 5, 2013, a rocket launched toward Mars. It was India’s first interplanetary mission, Mangalyaan, and a terrific gamble. Only 40 percent of missions sent to Mars by major space organizations—NASA, Russia’s, Japan’s, or China’s—had ever been a success. No space organization had succeeded on its first attempt. What’s more, India’s space organization, ISRO, had very little funding: while NASA’s Mars probe, Maven, cost $651 million, the budget for this mission was $74 million. 

This was not the only success of the mission. An image of the scientists celebrating in the mission control room went viral. Girls in India and beyond gained new heroes: the kind that wear sarees and tie flowers in their hair, and send rockets into space.”

x

there’s a movie adaptation of this! it’s obviously more dramatized/they use different names but i really really loved the movie! it’s called mission mangal and it was the first time i had heard of this and i was so surprised that literally? no one talked about it??? what they accomplished is incredible.

ALSO, Mangalyaan launched in 2013 and was meant to be a 6 month mission. It’s been in orbit around Mars now for more than 5 years and has enough propellant to keep going for even longer.

“The kind that wear sarees and tie flowers in their hair, and send rockets into space.”

FUCK YES. THIS IS THE TYPE OF REPRESENTATION I’VE BEEN HERE FOR!!

I love how the dudes at back are pure happy!!

Colonialism is not a concept of a bygone era.