A Very Angry Young Person

For the times I couldn't wear what I liked.

For the times I couldn't afford to by a scarf I didn't even want.

For the times I had to take a detour to avoid morality police.

For Iranian women, for Iranian people!

Stand with us and be our voice!🇮🇷🕊

i should NOT be an elder queer, i should be middle at most. i am a middle aged queer. most of the elder queers died.

when i was growing up i didn't go to pride parades, i went to pride marches. because that's 100% what they were in the 80s and 90s.

Child care is a mental health issue. I can’t help a client who works 80 hours per week to afford daycare, and doesn’t have the time or energy left to come see me. 

Drug policing is a mental health issue. I can’t help a client who ended up in prison because they got caught self-medicating with illegal substances. 

Police brutality is a mental health issue. I can’t help a client whose ‘anxiety’ is a very real and justified fear of ending up as a hashtag. 

Also yes, queer is more inclusive! Especially coming at it from an academic standpoint, people didn’t always use or identify with the terms we use now and you can’t always try to cram them into our modern perceptions of sexuality. We can argue for years about whether a famous historical figure was gay or bisexual or straight and trans or whatever, but if we can all agree that they were somehow queer then using that term allows us to move past the debate and into productive discussion. And not everybody everywhere shares the same terms for sexual and gender identity, or even the same concepts of those things, so queer really is a more inclusive term in a lot of cases.

Your words are slurs, too. Why do you get your words, but I don’t get mine? What makes you so special?

every single one of our labels has been used as a slur against us.

terfs and -phobes are always going to try and hurt us with what we identify as. but the fact remains these are OUR labels and always have been.

It just baffled me that people would think an identifier is automatically a slur just because someone uses it to mock someone. If we did that gay would be a slur. Stupid would be a slur. Autistic would be a slur.

This fake yarn is supposedly better for sheep.

Aimed at people who don’t know where wool comes from, it’s 100% plastic. Yes, plastic.

So any garment you wash will release microfibres into the sea. It’ll never decompose.

You’re supposed to believe that sheep shearing is violent and cruel. There are imbeciles out there that work in an unprofessional manner while shearing, but that’s not the case overall.

Sheep don’t suffer from having their fleece removed.

Left on, the fleece can become a home for fly eggs and the subsequent maggots which can eat the sheep. Chemical treatments are available to prevent that happening. It’s much better for the sheep, the land and the farmer to avoid chemical use.

“And this is really how capitalism usually works. It creates a problem, and rather than fix the problem, it creates a new business to solve the problem.”

For about ~10,000 years bread was a fucking staple of the human diet. we evolved to eat this food, our bodies, our societies were built on this food, but all of a sudden we’re seeing a rise in gluten intolerance*. Aka our bodies are rejecting this food we’ve spent 100 centuries eating. Where is this coming from?

Well, a big part of it is probably that less than 100 years ago corporations changed the definition of bread. (Like, figuratively and literally, they petitioned the FDA to change the legal definition of bread so they could put in additives.) In fact, industrialization has changed the process and the ingredients used to make bread, to the point manufactured bread is a profoundly different product from what our ancestors knew as bread. Let’s start with:

1) The Process: For thousands of years, humans relied on naturally occurring wild yeast and bacteria found in the air to make (leavened) bread and bread starters (fermented dough used to “start” new loaves. hence the term “sourdough”). you can still do this at home–all it involves is leaving a mixture of water and flour lying around for a few days. notice something missing? that’s right, YEAST. this process of making bread involves yeast–yeast from the air around you–but it doesn’t involve concentrated baker’s yeast. Baker’s yeast refers to various strains of yeast that are added directly to flour & water mixtures as a leavening agent. This allows the bread to rise more quickly and cuts down on the overall production time. Convenient, right?

Now, adding yeast is not automatically a bad thing, and bakers have been doing it for a damn long time in interesting ways (such as using yeast from beer brewing). But lately we’ve taken it to extremes–we’ve gotten too good at creating more and more efficient forms of commercial Baker’s yeast, specifically for industrial use on a mass scale. Manufacturers want bread to rise as fast as possible, because that is how you get more product on the shelves. Making bread in factories now takes a small fraction of the time it used to.

And why is this a problem? Because it turns out a more traditional “long fermentation process allows bacteria to fully break down the carbohydrates and gluten in bread, making it easier to digest and releasing the nutrients within it, allowing our bodies to more easily absorb them.” [1] The result is that the product you buy from the grocery store is less digestible and nutritious than the bread human societies traditionally relied upon. Hence the rise of gluten intolerance–the gluten we are eating is simply more difficult to tolerate than gluten in properly fermented bread. (This is the reason many people with gluten intolerances don’t experience symptoms when eating more traditionally made, longer-fermented sourdough.)

That’s not the only issue though. There’s also:

2) The Ingredients. not just the countless additives, but specifically: the flour. See, a grain of wheat is…incredibly nutritious, honestly. It has almost everything we need to sustain life and health. Civilizations did–and do–rely on bread as a fundamental dietary staple, to the point that you can track political instability with rising wheat prices. It’s essential. Look at this:

In a single grain, the essence of life.

So yeah, wheat is nutritional. We can build bodies and civilizations out of wheat. But it’s also, like…super difficult to access that nutrition. Well, more so than with most foods. If you eat a handful of wheat grains, a spoonful of flour–your body can’t digest that, you get basically nothing out of that (also raw flour isn’t safe to consume, don’t do that). Unlike many crops, wheat relies on being carefully and correctly processed in order for the final product to be as nutritional as possible. As stated above, part of that process is about fermentation. Another part is the quality of the flour, what it contains and how it has been milled and treated.

And that quality has changed a lot in just a century or two. Take white flour, for instance. White flour has been around for a long fucking time actually, but until the late 19th century it was considered a luxury item, a treat for the very wealthy. White flour was never considered a stable food–until industrialists learned how to manufacture it cheaply. [2] And then it was everywhere. And suddenly, surprise surprise, we started to see a rise in nutrition related illnesses. Because the bran and germ have been stripped away, white flour has only a fraction of the nutritional value of whole grain. But because this gives it a higher shelf life, it was more convenient (and profitable) for manufacturers. So when they learned about the health issues, what did they do? Go back to making healthier flour?

Pshaw. Of course not. No, instead they kept removing nutrients, then artificially adding them back in. And that is how we got enriched flour–flour which is still significantly less nutritious than whole wheat flour. [3] And this is what the previous quote about capitalism was referencing. The food industry created a problem, and rather than undoing the problem, they created a whole new business to “fix” it:

And thus came the mass rise of “enriched” foods.

Eat Wonder Bread! It has as much protein as roast beef! As much calcium as cottage cheese! As much iron as lamb chops! No need to eat real foods, when you can eat highly processed foods instead! Don’t cook your own meals, let trustworthy corporations feed you! Mass-produced factory foods are easy, are healthy! There will be literally no downsides or long-term repercussions to public health & wellness!

So yeah. Much of what we think of as “bread” is chemically and molecularly distinct from traditional bread, and is very different (and less nutritional) than what our ancestors were eating even just a century ago. (On an individual level, I’m not sure how to mitigate this, other than by purchasing the healthiest options available (e.g. whole wheat, sourdough), buying from small bakeries/farmer’s markets, or baking bread at home. Lately there has been a rise of small health-concious brands focusing on traditional fermentation and whole ingredients; some may be available in your area. But ultimately, it’s the entire wider system that needs to change.)

And there you have it! I have never been so incandescently furious about wonder bread. This documentary will do that to you–and will change your whole understanding of modern food. It’s a 4-part netflix series called Cooked (2016), based on Michael Pollan’s book of the same name. Most of the info above comes from the third episode, and is accurate to the best of my knowledge (but let me know if I got anything wrong).

*I want to be perfectly clear though, gluten itself is not inherently bad. It’s being demonized in the press on no scientific basis, just to push yet another diet fad. Unless your body has actual issues with gluten (e.g. celiac disease, gluten intolerance) there are no proven benefits to eating gluten-free. There are, however, benefits to eating less processed, more nutritional (delicious delicious) bread.

Not long ago, a politician and lgbtq+ activist called Alessandro Zan of the Partito Democratico (left-wing) decided to extend the Legge Marino ("Marino Law", 1993).

DDL Zan is, to put it easily, an idea for a law specifically meant for women, disabled and lgbtq+ people. Its goal is to protect women, people with disabilities and the lgbtq+ community from language and deeds that harm them, it's meant to condemn acts of verbal and physical violence against these communities whose rights are continuously stomped over and ignored, reduced to nothingness.

Women get beaten, raped, molested and murdered.

Why? For being women.

People in the lgbtq+ get attacked among the streets and killed.

Why? For being part of the lgbtq+ community.

People with disabilities get bullied, abused and killed. Why? For having disabilities.

What people don't understand is that these crimes against human beings happen BECAUSE of what those people are.

It's not just two people fighting for some unrelated reason and one of them happens to be, let's say, a trans person. It's one person fighting another person FOR being trans. It's one person harming someone for being part of the lgbtq+ community, and for that reason only, etc. You get the idea, I hope.

DDL stands for "Disegno di Legge": this means that the law has only been proposed so far, it's not been approved yet... and it probably never will. Not soon, anyway. The law keeps getting pushed back, because the parties keep insisting on the need to "modify" some of the instances presented. It happened yesterday too.

Why? Why wouldn't someone want women, disabled people and the lgbtq+ community to be safe? Because this country is misogynistic, pro bullying, ableist and anti lgbtq+.

"Think about the kids!", "This is a gender dictatorship!", "That bitch deserved what was done to her!", "Of course she got raped, she was wearing that skirt!", etc.

The average Italian personー and mind you, it's not only men, no, women too!ー just loves to see discrimination happen under their nose. This country doesn't care. Our politicians don't care. Discrimination is everywhere, this is not a safe country.

And as much as I love people saying things like "Italy's gay" here on Tumblr (and I partially agree) I need to remind you that no, it really isn't, not enough to guarantee anyone's safety.

Italian women aren't safe either. Italian disabled people aren't safe. Italian people in the lgbtq+ community aren't safe. People who fall within any of these categories are not safe.

That's right. Some days ago I saw someone talking about how it still was not so long ago when majority of European countries and the US introduced laws that protected queer people from hate crimes, no matter what the media like to boast about us living in an age of "progress". Well, Italy still doesn't have any law like that. The Mancino Law of 1993 protects against religious, racial, and ethnic discrimination and even condemns neo nazis and fascists in a particular way. But it says nothing about women, queer people and people with disabilities. To this day, we have no actual statistics of violent and non violent hate crimes specifically against these categories of people because they don't get counted as hate crimes in the first place, but we all know that the numbers are very high and they probably keep increasing.

If I got beat up in the street because I was walking with a rainbow bag (this happened to two 12 year old girls in my city just about a month ago btw) or because someone didn't like the way I dress, it'd be entirely up to the judge assigned to evaluate my case to determine whether my aggressor was simply bonkers or if he was a fucking homotransphobic piece of shit that at the very least needs to be locked up longer than, say, a drunk that punched someone in a bar for no reason.

Not surprisingly, the people opposing this very fundamental addition to the law are the far right parties that hold rallies to "defend the traditional family" and are "critical of gender theory" (albeit admitting to not know what gender is in the first place). But it's even the fucking Vatican itself. Yep. That old conundrum of pedophiliac mummies literally intervened for the first time in a very long time to oppose a DDL (at least one that wasn't about abortion or euthanasia), saying that the inclusion of the definition of gender identity in the law would basically hinder their religious freedom. Because to be hateful against women and queer people is indeed a liberty the catholic church feels it needs in order to maintain its shitty reputation, of course.