Progressive Propaganda and Cats

#throwback to that one time a platonic friend invited me to a swinger club#and his earnest reasoning was#'the buffet there is the best I have ever been to and it's so cheap we need to eat our way through the buffet together'#I didn't go but I have reliable sources that the buffet really is that good (via @notgreengardens)

#throwback to that one time a platonic friend invited me to a swinger club#and his earnest reasoning was#'the buffet there is the best I have ever been to and it's so cheap we need to eat our way through the buffet together'#I didn't go but I have reliable sources that the buffet really is that good (via @notgreengardens)

There is a reason why legislation and social pushback is typically focused on preventing you from coming out, preventing you from transitioning from the start, or detransitioning and/or closeting you. That is state violence, but the state is hoping you will either do the dirty work yourself (suicide) or fall in line with the White Supremacist Patriarchal gender roles it expects of you (closeting/detransition). I know that is bad. It's abysmal. It's awful. We are not here to downplay the violence that happens broadly to queer people at the hands of the government.

However, under White Supremacy, as a white queer person, you can be "saved" from the "lifestyle choice" you have "made". We're in a country dominated by Christian savior complexes, conversion therapy is a regrowing industry, the laws targeting us are laws of restriction, laws of "prevention". White queer people are a "problem" to be "solved" by trying to "save" us from ourselves so we can reintegrate into broader white, Christian society alongside other white people. We need to be "corrected" and "saved" because our whiteness is still valuable to Christian, Patriarchal, White Supremacy.

White Supremacist state violence in the United States murders Black infants on the false allegation that their mothers are stealing diapers. White Supremacist state violence murders Black children for playing with toy airsoft guns. White Supremacist state violence murders Black women for experiencing a mental health crisis. White Supremacist state violence murders Black men on the unproven allegation that they used a counterfeit $20 bill. White Supremacist state violence murders Black people for simply existing in their homes. Kohen Wiley, Tamir Rice, Sonya Massey, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Roger Fortson. The list could go on because just existing while Black is dangerous under White Supremacy.

Your analysis of your own place in society as a queer person is incomplete without this analysis. It is not enough to say "well trans WoC have it harder than me but cishet people all have it easier" because that is incomplete and ignorant at best and flat out wrong and racist at worst. Why do trans WoC, particularly Black trans women struggle and experience so much violence in our country? Why does that violence happen? You can't just say "because they're transgender and they're women and they aren't white" and leave it at that. What are the institutions, the power structures, the long standing histories of violence and subjugation at play here? Why is it dangerous for someone to exist as a Black person, everything else aside, in the first place? Why and how does your whiteness protect you where their Blackness creates a target for them and how do the systems around you exploit that and target you differently on a material level?

When fascism spikes, we get a two-fold where folks who cannot or will not assimilate are pushed by our oppressors to reconsider, and fellow queer/trans folks become some of the most aggressive enforcers of that “choice” in an attempt to buy safety within the majority.

This shit is why inter-community discourse is not just petty complaints—the refusal to hold solidarity with the weirdest, loudest, most visible queers in our midst is fascist as well as self-destructive. People are being forced into the closet, forced into labels that make others—including queer and trans people—more comfortable, because comfort and conformity becomes the biggest priority for many when shit hits the fan. And these are the scenarios that dont end up with nonbinary people dead.

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.