i’ve always found it interesting how time has turned white queer people from one of numerous demographics treated with scorn from society at large to one which, at least in urban areas, now often marks upscale and desirable places to live, with gentrification usually resulting. i actually can’t name a single major historical gay district which isn’t suffering pretty heavily from the issue of gentrification, which says a lot about how pervasive the shift has been in the US.
I think it’s an interesting problem because at the heart of it is the fact that many queer people live much happier lives than straight people because straight society enforces such strict standards on what a relationship should look like and how you should live your life. Rejecting one form of social constraint makes people more likely to consider and reject additional constraints such as a societal value placed on how much money you earn or your status in a community or other things which can be irrelevant to whether someone enjoys their life.
Because of this queers often end up making the places they live desirable because they are full of happy people who are less judgemental. They’re busy doing what makes them happy and others see it and desire to live somewhere free from the same burdens of society. So the rich who have access to capital end up moving in and gentrifying further.
I think it’s also important to note that this happens in other microcosms as well. Queer women tend to make less money and tend to get pushed out of an area by queer men. Artists often get pushed out of artist collectives and areas by folk with more access to resources over time. Minority communities with thriving art scenes of various sorts also get pushed out - this is incredibly common when new music styles catch on mainstream.
I don’t think there’s an easy answer to any of this, but I do find it amusing that it definitively proves that queers and minorities are inherently more cool. 😎
refreshing to for once not see the immediate response be prescriptivism about how iNcOrReCt a neutral third-person singular pronoun is or how it's the product of liberal wokeness or whatever--looking at you, France
the Académie française is somewhat notorious even among regulative linguistic bodies (which are, generally, by design prescriptivist) for its degree of linguistic prescriptivism, conservatism, and general distaste for anything it perceives as watering down the linguistic purity of the French language, and this tendency has carried over into the broader French ruling class and to a lesser extent the population as a whole
the article doesn't note this explicitly, but possession of testosterone without a prescription is a federal crime because testosterone is a Schedule III substance, and you can receive up to a year in prison accordingly on your first offense (and up to ten if you possess with "intent to distribute"). the scheduling also makes even legally acquiring testosterone a hurdle for a lot of trans and gender nonconforming people, because of how it's regulated:
“Criminalization has made it easy for pharmacists to deny my [testosterone] prescription, which has happened to me many times,” Artemis McGettigan, a trans student in Dearborn, Michigan, told Filter. “[Pharmacists] have told me in the past that ‘It’s corporate policy, they’re not allowed to fill that type of prescription … but I knew that was false because other CVS locations, for example, were able to fill it.” A CVS media representative told Filter that its policies “do not prohibit our pharmacies from filling testosterone prescriptions.”
Would it be fair to say that these restrictions were likely first introduced amid concern potential for abuse as performance enhancing by body builders and sports people, more than punishing gender variant people.
those are actually the reasons they were introduced; but they're also almost entirely immaterial to the harm which is being done, because testosterone's restriction unsurprisingly comes down most heavily on people with legitimate medical uses--people transitioning and people who have medical issues necessitating the use of testosterone--and not people who use it illicitly or illegally.
It’s always struck me as particularly weird that the government likes to make possession of many drugs, in any quantity, illegal. I can understand making laws that say if you have say, 10 years of use for one person, that it might be questionable whether that is entirely for you or for resale. But if the argument is to stop people who are not the government or pharmacies from selling a substance, the laws should explicitly call out selling the substance or having an extremely excessive amount, one beyond any reasonable expectation of personal use.
But then again drug scheduling was created explicitly as a way to start a war on drugs, so it doesn’t surprise me that they didn’t think through the medical implications of making drugs which people regularly are prescribed and need to live happy healthy lives. We’ve had decades to fix this, however, and have been entirely unable.
Let’s not forget how the war on drugs was also am excuse to discriminate without being as obvious about it, since weed was disproportionately used by mexican and black communities(? The details are a bit hazy to me, truth be told).
And since capitalism needs its blood sacrifice, and our constitution explicitly states that slave labor is still allowed for imprisoned people, we now have a permanent underclass of drug possessors to extract slave labor from. Not to mention that since we don’t have any robust ways to rehabilitate former criminals into society, and most jobs categorically deny the applications of anyone who has had a felony on their record, it just funnels these people back into the industrial prison complex. I mean what else are you supposed to do when you have no money and nobody will hire you?
Capitalism is working as intended and the criminalization of drugs is just one of those levers it can pull. It was never about the actual harmfulness of drugs, and that’s why problems like this have never been fixed.
Sadly this is entirely unsurprising and a clear focus of the republican platform. Trans rights are going first, because they are the easiest to deal with, but with it will go out the edges of other gay rights and gay rights eventually. It would not surprise me to see bills mimicking the various abortion laws going into affect having a similar reach but on queer issues instead - the ability to sue individuals who do what they don’t want happening. With a supermajority of conservatives on the supreme court and the absolute unwillingness of the democrats to solve these issues, I only expect this to get much, much worse before it gets better. I’ve been talking with a lot of my more liberal friends who live in the midwest and urging them to start thinking about moving, because I see this as a slippery slope which is only just starting to kick in.
Counterpoint: The midwest needs strong people to stand up against these wrongs more now than ever. By leaving it turns those kinds of places into an echo chamber of conservatism, which will have to be dealt with at some point one way or another. It’s not a position I would want to be in, but it’s better to fight it now before it becomes further entrenched.
One of the labels I’ve found hardest to wrap my head around is aromantic. Unfortunately I don’t know many who are aro who aren’t also ace, so it makes it a lot more difficult to help quantify just exactly what romance is. As with any socially defined construct, I struggle a lot with what it’s supposed to mean, and therefore have issues identifying whether I am aromantic or not. I’ve been leaning towards ‘probably’ for awhile now, but I’m unsure whether the label would help or hurt to describe who I am - it feels like conversations tend to be better for this and explaining to others that I don’t know what romance is and asking them what romance is for them tends to help.
the president also seems to have shot down a law which would more severely penalize abortions, which is nice given how strongly religious guatemala is as a country (it’s about half evangelical protestant and half roman catholic)
well, it's a fun list of 8 times strangers misread the author's gender. the author looks very masculine / androgynous, which has led to hilarious situations that are a nice relief from basic transphobia because they're like. creative transphobia!
Of course the red states have some of the highest volume of these searches.
It's really sad, you'd think just seeking information about one's sexuality should be freely available, but even that's being attacked at all levels- see the recent discourse on libraries, teachers, and universities in red states.
hoping for a good outcome here. i know the Thai military and monarchy both hold a lot of sway in society and politics in the country and will probably be huge barriers to accomplishing any of these, but it definitely seems like Thai people know what they want and are increasingly willing to fight for it collectively
All three of them. Two are graduating this year. So, all this to bar one trans girl from playing sports.
The GOP is pushing the story that trans women are everywhere, taking over everything, pushing women and girls out of activities and jobs and opportunities (playing off the idea that having been born male, they are inherently better at all aspects of life than mere women).
The lie about the numbers of trans women and girls is one thing, but the depth and strength of the misogyny the whole trans panic is predicated upon is mind boggling.
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