hello:)

goals: 2

it makes me wonder whether the response to sasha would be different if he didn't behave the way he does, wrt online discussions about his humility and conscientiousness and reserve, which are all true qualities he has that also happen to contrast conveniently against the western stereotype of the russian hockey player as being flashier and more prone to selfishness and laziness. specifically thinking about the common refrain that he's so modest, he never celebrates his goals, prefers to credit the teammate who set him up, etc., i always read a thread of relief, even if unconscious, in those comments as if they are pleased to be able to reaffirm his finnishness against the unspoken threat of his russian background. on the other hand as far as i can tell it's not something that comes up in discussion about ethnically finnish (or ethnically swedish in lundy's case) players. like idk lundy and rantanen and aho celebrate goals all the time and people don't accuse them of besmirching the respectability of finnish hockey or whatever. vs last year during i believe the conference finals when sasha celebrated his goals there were jokes (referring to the jatkoaika forum threads) feigning shock and outrage abt his shamelessness and one comment that really stuck out to me about how when sasha scored they were waiting to see if his arms went over his shoulders or if it was "a familiar and safe sasha." and like omgggg it's just a joke omg it's not that deep okay i get it!!!!!!!!! tbh i will probably continue to think the comments r funny and cute too but like there is truth to the fact that sasha would be much more difficult to reconcile within the finnish cultural consciousness if he did not happen to embody exactly the qualities of finnish hockey itself that make him quote unquote safe.

all this considered it makes sense why wags might consider themselves ‘women in motorsport’.

LET ME BE CLEAR I AM NOT SAYING THEY ARE.

The World Cup is going as expected in the States.

What a mess

Die praktisch gesamte moderne Wissenschaft zu LGBT-Themen verdanken wir den Forschungen von Leuten wie Magnus Hirschfeld, Ludwig Levy-Lenz, Iwan Bloch, Benedict Friedlaender und Friedrich Salomon-Krauss, allesamt jüdische deutschsprachige Ärzte und Wissenschaftler, die maßgeblich an der ersten Homosexuellen-Befreiungsbewegung beteiligt waren, die vom Institut für Sozialwissenschaften ausging.

Es gibt spätestens seit den Achtzigern Schwarze LGBT Aktivisten, die sich für Diversität und Sichtbarkeit in der deutschen LGBT Szene einsetzen (bekannte Aktivistinnen sind zB Peggy Piesche und Katharina Oguntoye).

Definitely connected to the scientific tradition established by institut fur sexualwissenschaft - some doctors from ifs even worked in Czechoslovakia around the war and post.

I think it’s good to look to local histories but I also would caution anyone from avoiding criticizing them or painting them in rosy colors.

I don’t have all criticism on hand, but I at least want to mention how being studied and of scientific interest to doctors is very fraught and complicated as a trans person. Yes, the research lead to HRT and other beneficial treatments, but bioessentialist approaches to sexuality and gender (inextricably tied to the state of modern medicine) have had deeply violent repercussion for lgbt people.

As a concrete example - the research attempting to understand sexual orientation biologically lead to the creation of penile pletyshmography - wherein a device is attached to the penis and the person is shown various pornography. The device measures the blood flow in the organ - ie how strongly the person “reacts” to sight of say, gay sex or naked women. I don’t want to go into details of how fucking offensive this logic is, I think that’s probably apparent to most. What’s relevant is that this method is used to “diagnose” (traumatize) some trans people in Czech Republic to this day.

And it’s not even something that you can fully separate from the affected communities, a lot of these scientists, both the historical ones mentioned in my post as well as contemporary academics were/are members of the LGBT community themselves. On top of that come other prejudiced influences, for example sexology, as well as any study of human reproduction have serious problems with eugenics. (Magnus Hirschfeld for example was gay, socialist and Jewish - and member of the German “Society for Racial Hygiene”).

But the background of my original point wasn’t to act like one history is “better” than the other or to erase any suffering caused by these histories. It’s more that I’m noticing a trend in non-US LGBT spaces to completely overfocus on the US, at the expense of local histories. There absolutely were societies (and East Germany was one of them) that had more progressive legal situations for LGBT people at the time of Stonewall, but I only pointed that out because Stonewall is being held up as THE event that lead to LGBT acceptance and recognition, not because the other countries at the time were perfect. But the US and the West aren’t the global standard against which LGBT activism and lives should be measured, if that makes sense? 

And specifically for Germany, that idea is completely ingrained in the LGBT community tbh. The overfocus on US history is part of it, so is the erasure of East Germany and East German LGBT history (despite it literally being the driving force behind a lot of progress that benefits all LGBT people in Germany) - usually when people in the LGBT scene in Germany talk about German history, they’re talking about West Germany. It also has other side effects, like the fact that a lot of the conversation about LGBT issues in Germany is happening in English or with significant amounts of English terminology - something that is especially alienating for people who never had an English class in their lives, which is a lot of the people who grew up in East Germany.

Or the intersection of homophobia with racism and especially antisemitism - for example, for the Nazis, homosexuality was inherently tied to Jewishness, which targeted these (disproportionately Jewish) people who were early German LGBT advocates. Historically, German homophobia has a strong antisemitic component, the same way the “traditional ideal” sex and gender roles are influenced not only by patriarchal and cissexist, but also ~racial and imperialist/colonialist ideas.

So to make it absolutely clear, we should not only look at our local history bc it’s cool (though it absolutely is and that alone would be a reason to look at it), but also because it IS the origin of our real life communities, including the problems of these communities.

Jordan Staal scores the game winning goal!

in case Bussi gets to play (i haven't checked yet haha):