your girl friday

Happy birthday to Josephine Baker, born on 3 June in 1906. Josephine was bi, making this a perfect day to celebrate some her and some other Black queer figures from history during Pride month!

no more gendered dress codes. no more gender markers on passports, driver's licenses, ids. i'm not talking about "adding x" or "adding a third category" i'm talking about no more categories, period. why does the government need to know what my genital situation is? why does the government feel the need to assign me a sex on the basis of genitals? why does the cop who pulled me over need to see an m, or an f, or an x?

no more "gender is a social construct, sex is the thing that's binary." sex is not binary. abolish the idea that it is. normalize conversations about intersex traits. being intersex is natural. the sex binary is a thing imposed by the state.

no more gendered sports. if you really care about equity, sort people into categories based on skill level and athleticism, not gender or sex. the concept that there are only two sexes and that one is inherently weaker than the other is pseudoscience. the male/female hunter/gatherer dichotomy is not based in fact, and is a product of modern sexist cultural biases. one gender is not inherently subservient to the other. people are not inherently different on the basis of sex or gender. it is just more complicated than that.

the concept of multiple genders and sexes beyond the man/woman male/female dichotomy has existed as long as humans have existed. the sex binary only serves to benefit the patriarchy. the gender binary only serves to benefit the patriarchy. continuing to impose it just controls (and harms) the people it forcibly categorizes.

Indicating a downward trend across all genres, a new report from the Recording Industry Association of America released Thursday found that music’s power to bridge divides and lift spirits had dropped 74%. “After this latest dip in its capacity to unify, we can no longer recommend music as a reliable means of bringing people together,” said RIAA representative Marc Olivier, noting that in the past year there had been almost no instances of the art form inspiring a group of strangers to set aside their differences and join hands in song.