As Pride Month begins, let’s not forget who paved the way for us. We have a lot to thank Marsha P. Johnson & Sylvia Rivera for.
No offense but why do many folks leave out Miss Major? Maybe that’s why she’s struggling to get money to settle down and retire because folks are praising the dead rather than trying to keep the living live good… but maybe I’m just ranting.
it’s hard not to notice how blindingly white a lot of lbpq media is, so i decided to make this list for all the lesbian, bi, pan, poly, and queer women of color looking for representation. i’ve only read or watched a few of these myself, so while i can’t vouch for most of them personally, i did my best to avoid media with bigoted portrayals. i added pretty much everything i could find but if i missed something, send us an ask and i’ll try and add it!
I personally knew I was gay before the age of 12. I thought I was weird. I thought it was just me. If I had had a teammate do what Emily did, [organizing a You Can Play fundraiser] it would have changed my whole life for the better between the ages of 12 and 18.
To know you are not alone, that you have support, and that who you are is exactly who you should be is half of the battle. It’s not always easy to be out and be who you truly are, but it makes it a whole lot easier when one of your peers says to everyone that they will not stand for homophobia.
Knowing that trans women of color started the movement in the united states and were literally immediately erased and excluded from what they started is the most deeply jading knowledge.
It is the original sin of the so-called queer community and it damns it from the cradle.
So, the last couple years y’all may have noticed a movement taking hold on both conservative and radical exclusionist gay circles called “Drop the T.” This movement, started possits that the LGBTQ movement is only the Gay movement and everything else is “appropriation” of Gay History.
This is, of course, total horse shit for a large number of reasons, so I’m going to go in point by point deconstructing this shit:
1) These people say, “It was gay people, not BTQ, that were targeted.” This is false even on it’s face. Even if you want to say trans people weren’t there because Stonewall happened in a time when the term trans wasn’t in popular usage (more on that in point 4), there were sure as shit crossdressers there, and they were ALWAYS the first ones targeted and carted off. The night of Stonewall, Storm DeLaverie, who wasn’t trans, was “Crossdressing” and the first arrested, so we’re Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who were trans. And guess what? Those three were the first to fight back. We owe this movement to them, and how dare you revise and erase our history for you ideology.
2) They point to Sodomy laws as proof it was gay people specifically targeted, while forgetting the existence of Crossdressing Laws, which were on the books LONGER THAN SODOMY LAWS. In New York, y’know where Stonewall happened, there were Anti Crossdressing Laws on the books until 2011 while they eliminated sodomy laws in the 1970’s! There was a federal ban on sodomy laws in 2003, Lawrence v Texas, but still none for Anti-Crossdressing laws.
3) People were arrested because they were homosexual, not bi or trans.“ No, they just didn’t care if were apart of the L, G, B, or T, we were Queers that had to be Taken Care Of. Why do you think we banded together in the first place?
4) The Nazis’ first target for book burnings was Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, which was the first medical institute to perform Sex Reassignment Surgery in the 1930s and the works of Magnus Hirchfeld, who coined the term “Transsexual.” The reason “trans people didn’t exist” in the time of Stonewall is because it took us almost half a century for us to recover. You’ll notice quite a few of Stonewall Veterans who were “crossdressers” back in the day, ID’d as translater in life when the language became available again. The Nazis were the first to try this, and they wiped us off the face of the Earth for decades.
5) Divide and Conquer. We are strong together, and weak apart. It is an attempt to weaken our movement now that it isn’t specifically focused on helping topass legislation benefit only cis gay people. We fought for your rights, and now you got yours so screw us? Fuck that. It’s ENDA, when Barney Frank and the HRC pushed to exclude trans people so they could have it for themselves, all over again.
6) It’s apart of a larger transphobic movement in which conservatives and radical exclusionists teamed up. Remember when the Reagan administration banned funding for trans healthcare? Yeah, they used writings of Janice Reymond as supporting evidence. These groups wrote to the fucking UN to have trans rights removed from International Human Rights laws. They team up for bathroom legislation, including sending cis men into women’s bathrooms to scare cis women into supporting bathroom legilsation. ENDA. What did we do that’s equivalent to that? Why do you despise us so much?
You have no basis for your movement, not histrocial, not political, not anything other than pure hatred. Go fuck yourselves. We’ll eliminate exclusionist before trans people.
this is one of the most important LGBT articles I have ever read in my life. It struck several chords with me and I recommend everyone to take some time to read it.
I was just reading this post about gendered socialization as it relates to emotional labor and I can’t find it anymore but I suspect the topic is particularly relevant to this post. Men, including gay men, never learn how to do emotional labor in their interpersonal relationships and straight men offload that labor onto their wives and girlfriends more often than not but if there’s no women around to offload the emotional labor it just … doesn’t get done. They just get increasingly mentally unwell????
So like, someone tell Michael Hobbes I have a very simple answer for his question.
Gay rights didn’t cure loneliness because toxic masculinity.
This is fascinating (in the sick to my stomach kind of way) that this is the same issues being brought up about bi, ace, and trans people: oversexualization of the community, the importance of positive representation and visibility, as well as intersectionality. It’s no wonder many minority groups don’t feel accepted into the LGBT community at large. They’re literally getting shamed out of the community by people trying to one up each other to display their masculinity to /feel loved at all/ and that’s. That’s a problem.
I also noticed this as a trans guy, but since I’ve had so much self made DBT skills on abuse and self care, especially related to my anxiety (where I got actual DBT), I’ve mostly shrugged it off and figured other guys in the community were doing that too. But thinking back on my experiences, that’s probably not actually as common as I thought.
Quote from article:
Pachankis, the stress researcher, just ran the country’s first randomized controlled trial of “gay-affirming” cognitive behavior therapy. After years of emotional avoidance, many gay men “literally don’t know what they’re feeling,” he says. Their partner says “I love you” and they reply “Well, I love pancakes.”
…Emotional detachment of this kind is pervasive, Pachankis says, and many of the men he works with go years without recognizing that the things they’re striving for—having a perfect body, doing more and better work than their colleagues, curating the ideal weeknight Grindr hookup—are reinforcing their own fear of rejection.
It’s called Tengoku, and it features two female leads: a trans lesbian, and a disabled bisexual woman.
Both are women of color (from a fantasy world based on Japan, with editors who helped me make sure their culture was portrayed accurately and respectfully).
Although I wrote the book, it was a team effort, with strong collaboration from several women (and men) who identify as Asian, mixed race, disabled, and trans. Again, this book features a female trans lead.
Today, I found out it was named a finalist for the Golden Crown Literary Awards in the Science Fiction/Fantasy category. (This year, there is no trans category, which is a problem for another day).
I am flattered and humbled that the GCLS judges thought my manuscript worthy of inclusion.
But. (There is a big but here). Some TERFS on facebook are writing articles saying it shouldn’t be eligible for the award, or even the category. According to them, trans women shouldn’t be eligible for lesbian book awards, even if they are lesbians and are in lesbian relationships.
I’m not going to link the article because my publisher has asked me not to. (She thinks angry comments on it from my fans will look unprofessional). But I feel the need to respond somehow, to let the detractors know that they are 100% wrong.
My wonderful publisher absolutely has my back, and the GCLS obviously does too, since Tengoku is a finalist.
But even so, I need them to hear they made the right call.
Contact them and tell them thank you for including trans lesbians in their awards. It should be common sense that trans lesbians count as lesbians, but unfortunately, some people still don’t understand. So please, please please, support the book, tell your friends, signal boost the fuck out of this post, and tell the GCLS trans lesbians belong in the lesbian category. Period.
Edit: Please be positive! I want to overwhelm them with thank you notes. They’re doing the right thing. ^^
Steel Phoenix Studios 