Blazer of cat photos, not trails.

If you are in the United States and not employed by a zoo or sanctuary or a veterinarian working with a facility, if anyone for any reason offers to allow you to touch a big cat, please do not do it.

No matter how much you want to, no matter how much it is a dream, understand that it is a violation of federal law that could get the facility the cat lives at in very serious trouble. It does not matter if it is through the fence, or in the context of a trained behavior, or if the cat is on a leash. Even if it feels “safe” or they swear the facility condones it.

It’s starting to appear that lots of zookeepers have not been informed appropriately about the scope of the law - or in cases where they do know it’s inappropriate, they are sometimes being overridden by their management and forced to allow encounters. (Even at accredited facilities!)

We do not know exactly what the penalties could be for that happening within an accredited zoo (yay badly implemented laws) but it typically comes down to being risk to a) the cat’s welfare b) the facility’s ability to have any big cats at all and c) someone, either the facility owner or the person offering, could go to jail or pay serious fines. There are two instances of this happening at AZA zoos that were leaked recently and we may now find out how bad it’s going to get for them.

Lots of facilities will have big cat pelts as educational biofacts that they will allow you to touch. You do not ever need to take the risk associated with touching a live big cat - generally anywhere, and especially in the US.

I literally got to touch three different big cat pelts today in one zoo visit (didn’t take a photo of the lion one). You! Don’t! Need! To! Touch! Live! Cats!

Their mother picked up after them. They were not required to take plates the kitchen or do the dishes or anything like that.

My mother, who would tell you she is for equality, came home one day, sighed at the mess of dirty dishes scattered about, and said, "Gayle, help me pick up."

"Those aren't my dishes," I said. "I picked up my dishes."

My mother sighed again. "Just help me pick up."

"No," I said again. "I didn't make that fucking mess."

She never approached my brothers and said, "Boys, in this house, you take your dishes to the kitchen." She did not tell our dad, "Hey, tell the boys they need to pick up after themselves."

It was, "Gayle, pick up the dishes."

And when I refused because it was not my fucking mess, I got lectured about being difficult.

See also: My brothers--in a classic dick-move of all siblings--figured out they could pop the lock on the bathroom door and throw it open, and I would freak out because I was in the shower and trying to get five fucking minutes of peace.

When I tell people this, they always, ALWAYS, assume I have sisters. They say shit like “oh I’d love to do that, but I have boys” and when I tell them I only have brothers, “oh you must have eaten a lot of burned dinners then!”

Like, no. To both of those statements. Sure we burned stuff when we were younger but we all learned to cook before 13, that was just the age where it became a scheduled chore. You know who did burn everything? My MOM. My Boomer dad did all the cooking because my mum didn’t want to and he was the one to help when we needed it, though my mum did help with prep/chopping things.

Fast forward to now, middle brother can make the best risotto I’ve ever had and my youngest brother is vegan and makes almost all his own meals because his partner isn’t and he doesn’t expect her to make two meals so he can eat.

The worst part of this social conditioning is how bullshit it is. I know this is not ingrained, I know people are teaching their sons to be assholes, and I look at my middle brother in his immaculate apartment with tasteful decor that he picked out himself and I look at my youngest brother who does all the clothes shopping for him and his partner because she struggles with it and it makes me want to just start biting people.

Same with magnesium; small doses, 2-3x a day.

Otherwise your body just don't process it and dumps it into your urine.

I had that conversation more often than I'd like to with minors trying to engage with my fanfic.

It's literally my responsibility as an erotica content creator to keep my content AWAY from minors, and I take that seriously.

For once: most written stuff is barely legislated in most countries. Which is part of the reason why in most countries books do not have age ratings. There might be suggestions and recommendations, but at large nobody is gonna stop a 12yo from buying an erotic novel on basis of the law. It is not illegal for a 12yo to, for example, read a Coleen Hoover book, which tend to feature graphical sex scenes, in the same way it would technically be illegal (though not necessarily immoral) in many places to provide the same 12yo with a pornographic movie.

In the same vein, most countries also do not have a whole lot of legislation outright outlawing any specific kind of writing. Which is part of the issue why it is so fucking frightening that some governments do apply laws that were explicitly not made to cover this kind of stuff to random written things. Because this is largely arbitrary and kinda means that with precedence it starts to be a free-for-all. If this one writer gets legally charged for writing one thing, the next person might try to legally charge someone for another thing. Because technically neither is covered by the law, so any application of the laws is arbitrary and creates dangerous precedent. This is where the slippery slope comes into play.

Legislation as it stands in most places only ever covers visual material, and even there obviously there is a ton of legal grey area, as soon as it comes to artistic renditions of stuff. The meme of the 3000yo dragon loli does not come from nowhere. And also, well... for example: one of my favorite manga as a teen was officially 16+ in Germany. Now, the age recommendations for manga were never enforced, as manga and graphics novels and comics in Germany at the time were still handled as literature (I am honestly not sure how it is these day). Meaning it was a recommendation, but not a rule. You did never do anything illegal by selling that manga with a 16+ sticker to a 14yo. (A friend of mine owned the local comics store, so I know this for a fact.)

But also, lastly: when will fucking online people learn that "this is illegal" is never, ever true for everyone. Because outside of murder, which tends to be illegal everywhere... I do not think there is a single thing that is illegal in every country in every circumstance.

Tuesday, Wednesday tread through muck

Thursday maybe eat a duck

It’s Friday, Flat as Fuck

How to Defend Books and Why

Danny Caine

Listen on Audiobook

You're invited to the book revolution!

Fight back against censorship and empower your community with this close look at the book banning movement.

In a moving, compulsively readable call to arms for readers everywhere, Danny Caine, bestselling author of How to Resist Amazon and Why and How to Protect Bookstores and Why, offers an expertly-crafted confrontation of far-right, Christian nationalist attempts to reshape American culture through ban campaigns targeting schools, libraries, bookstores, and prisons, with the aim to silence marginalized identities in life and in literature.

From the first-ever banned books display at San Francisco's City Lights in the 1950s to the rapid rise of so-called Moms For Liberty during the COVID-19 pandemic to attempts to silence Palestinian authors, Caine charts the course of repressive censorship campaigns, along with the creative and sometimes unlikely activists who've stood up against them.

Each chapter is based on a particular book banning episode, bolstered by research and legal precedent, and concludes with helpful takeaways for further reading or resistance.

Throughout, Caine approaches these heated issues with gentle openness harkening back to his work as a public school teacher and a bookseller.

He emphasizes our collective responsibility towards art, free speech, and each other.

I don’t know how universally relevant this is (I guess no part of queer history ever is) but I wonder how many trans people know the history of T&T groups.

Like, in the 90′s and 00′s in the Netherlands almost every trans related groups was a T&T ‘Transsexual and Transvestites’ group and that seemed to also be a quite common thing in other north-west European countries for as far as I can see. Maybe beyond Europe too? I’m not sure.

People who called themselves transsexual and transvestites at the time felt that they had many experiences in common that made organising together valuable and many agreed that there was a large grey area of overlapping identities. With very little information available, a lot of trans women identified as transvestites first, before identifying at trans women (in that period often using the term Male-to-Female transsexual and transwoman without the space between the words).

Then, in about 2007-2012, things changed. Transgender became more popular than transsexual and crossdresser largely replaced transvestite. In those early days, the term transgender was often understood to include crossdressers. The transgender umbrella is from that time:

Back then, the word transgender was seen by many as the umbrella term that would unite all the struggles against gender roles. But that grouping together was far from uncontroversial and a lot of heated debates took place over how broad or narrow the transgender umbrella term should be. Some feared too wide an umbrella would take attention away from transsexuals, others feared it would be confusing, some groups that had previously only had transwomen and transvestites did not appreciate the new presence of transmen and transmasculine people in their transgender community, some felt that it was very important to distinguish binary-identified transsexuals from all sorts of weird non-binary identities.

Those who took part in the debates probably remember the specific standpoints in more detail. For me, I just remember how in 2008-2012 all the T&T groups started changing their names to ‘transgender groups’ and then slowly but surely focussing more on only those transgender people that wanted some kind of transition, physical or social. Eventually, transvestites (or crossdressers, as the common term was by then) disappeared entirely from the transgender groups and a lot of transgender people forgot about the earlier wider meaning of transgender as an umbrella term.

Within that same period, there started to be a LOT of new and fairly positive media attention for transgender issues, specifically transition related atttention. The media was no participant at all in the ‘what does transgender mean’ question but the questions they did ask were ‘are you on hormones yet?’ and ‘did you have the surgery’? Since that was a lot better than ‘so are you mentally ill because you want to be a woman?’ a lot of people who fitted the hormones + surgery narrative eagerly accepted this ‘positive visibility’ and did not question the narrow focus. This further cemented the view that transgender meant transition.

And the transgender activists? Well, let’s just say many of them, knee deep in a struggle against terrible health care and cruel human rights violations, leaped at the opportunity to seize the momentum and finally make some changes and many didn’t really give much thought to the slow disappearance of transvestites from the newly named ‘transgender’ community.

So where are we now, in 2018?

The transgender community seems to have largely forgotten about their T&T history. The terms transvestite and crossdresser both seem to be in decline, as are the communities that meet around those identities. Younger people who don’t fit the gender binary but also do not desire social or physical transition, are now more likely to identify themselves as some kind of genderqueer and nonbinary or just ‘not into labels’ or just to wear whatever they want and rock it. Some of them find their way back under the transgender umbrella after all. Which I guess is some kind of a happy ending.

I am not going to dignify these comments with a response because they’re too disgusting to reblog, I do not think they would listen and frankly reading them fills me with far too much emotion to write coherently.

I just wanna say: this is what happens when we are so quick to forget our very recent history. Despite the many debates and divisions that have existed in the past, few trans people could have had these completely off-the-wall misguided ideas 15 years ago because if they travelled in trans spaces they would have met so many transvestites and crossdressers. They would chat and hang out and probably make friends. They would swap experiences, share hardships and learn to recognize transvestites and crossdressers as siblings in the community of gendernonconforming and marginalized people.

My heart breaks for the young crossdresser out there today who might enter a trans space looking for their community of supporting likeminded people, only to find out that they are not welcome and even despised. I can only hope that if this happens, some older trans people will talk some sense into their younger community members and remind them of the long road transgender people and crossdressers have walked together, the battles we fought together, the crossdressers who fought for trans rights and the trans people who fought for their siblings too because we understood those struggles as interconnected.

her name was Marsha P Johnson, and we have her to thank for so much.

remember, the first Pride was a riot, and she was one of the brave souls who endured it to help carve the path which so many of us walk today. she helped found several activist groups regarding LGBT safety and wellbeing. and she was absolutely radiant, too.

i think a lot of people think it was simply because she was an icon

she was

because she fought for a huge chunk of the rights we have today

she didduring a time at whoch she risked very serious risk of imprisonment and death even more than we face now

she did

and she did it all as a trans woman of color

she did

BUT notably silvia rivera did all of these things too!!! and they co founded a queer rights together the two of them called street transvestite action revolutionaries AKA STARs and yet marsha p is remembered and silvia died homeless and poor

so why remember marsha p specifically???

well we have someone specific to thank for our yearly reminder to remember marsha p

this dedicated to paye written by none other

than leslie feinberg

now zie wasnt solely responsible for it a lot of movement happened before and after to ensure we memorialize her right but its notable why feinberg asked we remembered her why the book was dedicated to her

"Dedicated to two trans warriors who fell in battle"

feinberg talked about this later in an interview

this is the section in question specifically

"KELLY: Can you tell us about the people who you dedicated the book to - Brandon Teená and Marsha P. Johnson?

FEINBERG: I dedicated the book to Brandon Teena, a young white male who was arrested by the pólice who later exposed to the town that he was born female and he was kidnapped and gang-raped and beaten by two men after this discovery and later stabbed to death along with two other people by these same two men. No one has yet carried out a community investigation into the role of the police in instigating this violence against Brandon Teena. But his death has served as a rallying cry not just for the trans communities but I think also for the lesbiangay bi communities and the women's movement to put a stop to this violence. Marsha P. Johnson, who I also dedicated the book to, was an African-American drag queen who was a combatant at the Stonewall Rebellion against pólice brutality and bigotry. She was found floating in the Hudson River a little more than four years ago. The police conducted an investigation that consisted of two phone calis and ruled her death a suicide. But when a people's postering campaign began in Manhattan and the Village we discovered reports that a group of young bashers had been surrounding her on the same piers near where she was found. So, I think that both of these people's lives are an indication that orí the one hand we don't even know how many people were killed or died under similar circumstances in the past and whose lives and deaths were rendered invisible. But Brandon Teena's and Marsha P. Johnson's deaths are a demand now for us that this cease; that we're going to put our energy into stopping this kind of violence . . . and the cover-up."*

these two trans people were not just memorable but were also killed in incredible acts of violence had their deaths barely investigated and even covered up

i hate when people make everything about trans discourse as often it just puts a wedge between us and i do not want to taint the memory of remembering the death of a most influential black trans woman by petty oppression olympics still i think its worth pointing out that as people keep trying to act as if trans men arent oppressed trans men arent in the same kinds of danger as trans women that trans men dont get killed in hate crime acts like trans women even despite the death of lucas redbeard knapp this year that we remember not only WHY we remember johnson but also i want us to remember the man whose death was first uttered in the same sentence as marsha p johnson most well known remembrance rallying cry

brandon teena a trans man whose death was incredibly violent and the end result of sexual assault that got actively covered up by police

this year i plead i beg of you all let us remember both

id under the cut

I saw this when running newpipe. But wait, it gets deeper. I clicked on the details buttons and it said as of today, we have 83 days left until Google rolls out this new requirement for apps inside and outside of the google play store. If any developer disagrees with their new terms and fees, they will be blocked!

I'll share some of the info below:

Looks like they're trying to nuke the remaining privacy and freedoms we have left on the internet.

What to do?

-Get your developer friends to not comply to their new guides

- Sign the open letter on the site and take action by checking out the full resources list on their website as well!

To summarize, this is all daunting especially when you feel all alone with unfair and inhumane regulations comming out faster than improvements but we got this working together!

Share the link with your friends, family and anyone who will listen!

Link to the article