Monday, April 22, 2013

(Source: zeroambit)

Thursday, August 16, 2012
I don’t like this expression ‘First World problems.’ It is false and it is condescending. Yes, Nigerians struggle with floods or infant mortality. But these same Nigerians also deal with mundane and seemingly luxurious hassles. Connectivity issues on your BlackBerry, cost of car repair, how to sync your iPad, what brand of noodles to buy: Third World problems. All the silly stuff of life doesn’t disappear just because you’re black and live in a poorer country. People in the richer nations need a more robust sense of the lives being lived in the darker nations. Here’s a First World problem: the inability to see that others are as fully complex and as keen on technology and pleasure as you are. Teju Cole (via semperes)

(Source: thewhiskeypropagandist)

Friday, August 10, 2012

We have decided to transition.

thisselfishsmile:

This is a pretty momentous thing, and I’m sort of making a point of sharing it with everyone for a handful of reasons.

One, I AM REALLY FUCKING EXCITED.

Two, it’s a big thing, and because of the way I run my blog/my relationships both online and offline, it bears knowledge. Considering the majority of you all aren’t going to be seeing/hearing me in order to ask “hey, what’s different?”, it’s kind of something that bears telling rather than being learned through observation.

For those followers who do not know (you must be new here, ahaha) I am trans*, female to male. I am also multiple. These two things mean I am a man in a biologically female body and I share said body with a number of other people. The majority of the other people in this body are male. Despite this, however, we had decided a number of years ago not to transition. This was because two of our system members are not male. One is genderfluid, and one is female. (The third odd ball out is nongender, and doesn’t give a crap what we do with the body, so this is all the mention xe gets.)

We have a lot of respect for each other. This is one of the key elements to our functioning so well as a group. As such, when the genderfluid and female members of the system weren’t sure they would be comfortable with the body transitioning, the rest of us gave them hugs and told them that was perfectly fine. And we meant it. It was a relatively small blow, considering we had already been presenting as male and as ourselves (giving our own names, despite that they are very different from the body’s current legal one).

Due to a condition that I went through some months ago, however, our dysphoria became so severe that we could not leave the house. Since then it has been an uphill struggle, but we have finally managed to get to a point where, despite that we no longer pass almost no matter what we do, we are able to confront society under certain conditions and for short amounts of time. We have come to recognise, however, that at this point in time the root of nearly /every single one/ of our anxieties and other mental problems is our dysphoria.

I am going into a professional career. In this professional career, I am identifying as myself. Male, gay, geeky, silly, old-fashioned Drake. The body does not look like this, and I have had to figure out a precarious balance between my professional face and my personal face. So far it has worked, but I have had to be increasingly cautious as I branch out more. The fact that I present as male but am not legally male could present serious legal problems in the future. It is a thing I was willing to sit down with a lawyer about, however, if it came to it. This is how much we love our sisters. I haven’t even thought twice about it the entire time.

Unbeknownst to us, however, the girls had been talking. This morning, upon waking, I was approached by them. We called a group meeting, and they told us that they would like us to transition. They were okay with that. They presented sound facts that supported this conclusion, both on our part and theirs, and after some more discussion we decided that this is the best idea for us all.

It’s going to be a long, hard process, but I agree with the rest of the system - we think we are ready. It won’t be something that starts immediately - right now there is other therapy that is needed more, and we don’t have the money to put toward something like that, and we need to figure out the legal, medical, social, and psychological avenues which need to be taken, but…

This is a green light.

And this /will/ be happening.

Thank you all.

Love,

The Neon Gay Disco Drake (WHO IS SO EFFING EXCITED YOU GUYS OKAY I SERIOUSLY //CAN’T// ASDNFSDFOAHKESRJGFNSDA)

Thursday, July 12, 2012 Friday, July 6, 2012

miltonicsmile:

crabkiddd:

coelasquid:

Garfield minus Garfield Minus Jon Plus Jon, remains the only Garfield edit you really need in your life.

LOGAN HOLY SHIT LOGAN

XFG:JSLJFLFKF:GBN>SFLU

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Abortion - Myths and Reality

pleasesexplain:

Abortion has become an increasingly controversial topic. The anti choice movement has created a plethora of misinformation and flat-out lies. If you google information about abortion, a lot of scary, untrue “information” can come up, and this can be dangerous. I’m here to debunk some common myths about abortion.

MYTH: If you have an abortion, you won’t be able to have any kids in the future.

REALITY: Abortion is an extremely safe procedure. It’s 10 times safer than giving birth if performed before the 18th week of pregnancy, and about twice as safe as having your tonsils removed. A safe, uncomplicated abortion procedure should not affect future fertility. An abortion does not make miscarriage more likely, increase the risk of ectopic pregnancy, cause birth defects, cause premature birth, or increase the risk of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS).

MYTH: Abortion causes breast cancer.

REALITY: A link between abortion and breast cancer has never been found. This myth has been promoted by people and groups that are against abortion; they use this idea to frighten people away from obtaining an abortion.

MYTH: If I have an abortion, I will become depressed and get “post-abortion stress syndrome.”

REALITY: The American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association do not recognize the existence of “post-abortion stress syndrome.” They have found the anti-choice studies and research flawed. Most scientific studies found that the long-term reactions to having an abortion are positive. Those at high-risk for depression and other psychological issues after abortion are people who already had emotional and psychological issues before the procedure.

MYTH: Plan B/emergency contraception causes abortion.

REALITY: Emergency contraception, also called Plan B and the morning after pill, is not the abortion pill. Emergency contraception stops a pregnancy from happening, while the abortion pill (RU-486 or mifepristone) terminates an already existing pregnancy.

MYTH: Only irresponsible people want abortions.

REALITY: According to the Guttmacher Institute, one in three people will have an abortion before age 45. Roughly two-thirds of those people will already have children and families. Mistakes happen. In a perfect world, birth control would be 100% effective, easy to use, and free or low cost. Everyone would have fact-based comprehensive sex education and access to sexual health services. There would be no rape or incest. Birth complications and birth defects would no longer exist. But, unfortunately, the world is not like that. Until that happens, abortion needs to be kept safe, legal, and accessible.

Wednesday, May 30, 2012
i’ve consciously chosen to resist essentialism in all forms because i have personally witnessed how that mindset perpetuates violence. hell, biological determinism hurts women more frequently than anybody else. transfeminism is pushing the feminist movement forward to stretch our understanding of the variations within the category of “woman,” and that is only making feminism stronger. cis feminists like myself only benefit from listening to the stories of others who have been targets of gender violence. because when we bear witness to the struggles of others, we learn better strategies of resist multiple forms of oppression in our daily lived experiences. If there’s an intellectual equivalent to making one’s heart go pitterpatter — making one’s brain/mind go all clickety, if you will — this would do exactly that. I am so lucky to know and work with this person. Rachel // ineffableshe (via suzy-x)

(Source: ineffableshe)

(Source: weheartit.com)

Friday, May 25, 2012
The drug war is causing crime. It is just chewing up young black men. And it’s killing Newark.” In 2001, Booker told CNN, “you have incarceration rates in this country now that are outrageous…you aren’t really solving the problem by just throwing people in jail.

Newark Mayor Cory Booker Declares Drug War ‘A Failure,’ Endorses Medical Marijuana | ThinkProgress

He is absolutely correct!

(via tinfoilandtea)

Friday, April 20, 2012 Monday, November 28, 2011
It should not be possible to be antiracist without being against oppression. Yet race-liberal hegemony has been so effective that today in the United States everyone is antiracist, and yet oppression is banal and ubiquitious. We live with it, accepting the idea of racialized no-go zones in cities and new vulnerabilities to premature death for disposable classes; we eat it, consuming bananas harvested by dispossessed Indians in Honduras who work under the threat of gunfire and grapes picked by migrant laborers who are hunted by the same people who enjoy the literal fruits of their labor; we pay for it, supporting militias in Iraq that stake their territorial claims on women’s bodies; we study it, publishing research showing that human trafficking is more pervasive than ever and that under the curent system blacks will never gain wealth equity with whites—findings that receive scant hearing and generate less uproar. The unifying power of state antiracisms has become our stumbling block. Although they put white supremacy in permanent crisis, having been made to work for U.S. global ascendancy, and, now, neoliberal sovereignty, have dematerialized antiracism to the degree that dematerialized antiracism is now disintegrating the collectivity of social life. Once, civil rights activists were red-baited as communists for trying to desegregate lunch counters and schools, and today the accusation of socialism is launched against the concept of the public good itself… Racialization procedures must turn round, so that instead of legitimizing processes of accumulation so extremely uneven that the lives of some must appear without value, racialization—in the sense of the differential worth of human beings—will signal the necessity of altering material conditions. In order to accomplish this two-way rearticulation of the empirical and the epistemological, the materializing cultural power of reading, teaching, and the humanities must be harnessed. ‘Otherwise,’ to quote Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘who crawls into the place of the ‘human’ of ‘humanism’ at the end of the day, even [or, now, precisely] in the name of diversity?’ Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, pp. 49-50. (via lowendtheory)
Friday, November 18, 2011
funny and frighteningly accurate

funny and frighteningly accurate

(Source: fireking)

Friday, November 4, 2011