i must, obligitarily, note: a higher amount of transfem cast members (or the presence of them, period) does not necessarily mean a completely safe environment for transfems, either viewers or cast members alike. but at the very least, it demonstrates a marked effort to platform and support trans women as valued community members. an effort which, notably, dropout tv has not bothered to make. nrb in specific, the channel this happened on, is one of the botc community channels striving to make this effort, with one of the key and beloved members in their botc series being mara joy (who is a trans woman, noted not to tokenize her in specific but to highlight her)!!

so, to lay it out more specifically, sam reich made this joke on a platform that is expected to be a safe space for transfem viewers. he was a guest star on a show which has far less social pull than dropout tv, was the only white cishet guy in the room, and took advantage of that. i cannot stress this enough: sam reich went to a community that has a general expectation of being a safe place for transfems, as a guest, likely for the purposes of promoting his latest kickstarter, and he used that platform to make a "joke" about transfems being pedophiles.

it was also directed towards a gay man, who, like… well, we all saw the clip, it's my opinion that he looks pretty genuinely uncomfortable for a moment before trying to hide it by playing it up for the camera. tbh i find it disappointing that said joke ended up in the final edit at all! but the fact that sam felt so comfortable dropping that kind of quip given the setting and the current overall climate is so frustrating and gross.

If your doctor makes multiple documents confirming that you suffer from alopecia because of stress and the medicine you have to take for your epilepsy and that wearing a bonnet or something is recommended for your mental health as you’re not ready to go out bald in high school as a teenage girl, instead of admitting they are wrong the school will accuse the doctor of lying and report him to the Ordre des Médecins (equivalent of the General Medical council). Your doctor will find himself asking you for a document stating that you are not Muslim in order to defend himself and prove that no he wasn’t colluding with you so you could wear a substitute for hijab.

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In France if you are a North African nurse at a public hospital and wear a fabric surgical cap they will try to make you remove it because apparently it’s a hidden hijab. They will accuse you of going against secularism and when you’ll argue that they are discriminating you by assuming you’re Muslim for a surgical cap on your head they will change their angle and claim that you should wear nothing on your hair because you wear the same surgical cap in multiple bedroom which is unhygienic apparently (which is a bullshit argument cause you wear the same scrub/uniform in different bedrooms as well). They will go as far as claiming that disposable scrub caps (you know the thin papery ones?) are not okay to wear in a hospital even if you change it regularly. And then they will fire you for a lack of hygiene because you wear a surgical cap.

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All of that will be done in the name of secularism and women’s right despite having nothing do with either quite the opposite.

Being fat means you can't ever be in line at a food pantry without somebody commenting "How could you be hungry?"

Being fat means being locked out of anorexia recovery by society and by the mental health field itself, to the point that you're not even allowed to be diagnosed with anorexia if you're fat. No, you have "atypical anorexia." Normal anorexics are thin.

Hm? The disorder is literally the exact same minus the fatness? Eating disorders are behavioral disorders, not weight disorders? Yeah, I wish facts mattered too.

do i think you should be allowed to cut someone off and continue to understand what they did was wrong? do i think you're allowed to be angry and frustrated and upset with them? yes obviously. but i also think that doeant give you carte blanche to go on and ruin their life.

"Some 6,000 years ago in the northern reaches of modern Latvia, a young woman died. Afterwards, a group of early humans buried her in an ancient, sacred place along a lakeshore. They carefully lowered her small teenage frame into the ground, gently placing a stone ax, 28 flint flakes, 15 blades, and a stone scraper beside her. Stained with ochre, the stone implements were part of her last rites. This young woman remained there thousands of years, until, when archaeologists discovered her along with more than 300 others in the 20th century. The site, known as Zvejnieki cemetery, is one of Europe’s largest Stone Age cemeteries.

Research conducted at Zvejnieki has often challenged longheld assumptions about gender roles in prehistoric Europe. For instance, the young woman interred in burial 211 described above is one of several women and children buried with stone axes at the site, upending the notion that axes only belonged to Stone Age men. Now, a new study published September 10 in the journal PLOS One again upends gender stereotypes, demonstrating that women and children were just as likely to be buried with stone tools as men. The woman in burial 211 alone was laid to rest with a staggering 45 different stone objects. 

(...)

This flies in the face of a decades-old stereotype that Stone Age women didn’t use stone tools as frequently as men. The women were too busy cooking, crafting, and caring for the family to bother with the stone tools used by men in hunting and building. Or so the outdated story went.

“Our findings overturn the old stereotype of ‘Man the Hunter,’”  Little said in a statement. Historically, this stereotype “has been a dominant theme in Stone Age studies, and has even influenced, on occasion, how some infants have even been sexed, on the basis that they were given lithic tools.”