what god doesn't gabagoo

Today my mom comes home and tells me that she’s been terminated as well. This couldn’t have possibly come at a worst time for us. Both of us fired with less than a week in between.

As much as we would have liked them to, our expenses have not slowed down. The rent is still due, car note still has to be paid. We’ll be using the small amount of savings we have to get through the remainder of this month.

I have no choice but to ask for help here, even though I’m embarrassed and ashamed to have to do so.

My Cash App is $MaiyaGant if any of you are able to help us out. Any and everything is appreciated! | If you’ve never signed up: Use my code and we’ll both get $5 [DNDTMWK] cash.me/app/DNDTMWK

*I also have a few brand new and lightly loved makeup and skincare items I’m willing to sale to supplement some of my income, as I secure a new job. If this is of any interest to you, please DM me and I will send you a direct link.

This is a rallying cry: Trans Women of Color, or #TWOC (as people who engage in social justice discourse usually abbreviate with no context) are often used to deploy all kinds of guilt and condemnation at groups who experience any number of privileges that my identity group typically does not. I know I should be thrilled by this, but alas, I am not. Moralistic castigations of all sorts are lobbed at people who don’t already ‘get it’. At my expense.

no of course not why would i have anything against cis gay men dressing up as women and illegitimizing my identity? Its not like because of them my mom can’t see me as anything other than one of them because their presence overshadows actual trans women’s lives. Its not like they actively erase trans women’s identities like that of Marsha P Johnson and claim they were drag queens. its not like they get to wear my identity as a dress when they want to and not experience any of the struggles of trans women, again illegitimizing my identity. 

I need you white women, you white queers, to understand the history of drag before you decide to decry it. You all clamor about “protecting ~poc~ at all costs” but rarely do you ever critically engage with our histories, which can be seen here and in the white feminist/queer demonization of drag culture in the west.

Drag is not intrinsically an attack on your identity as a woman, as a white person. I hate to break it to you, but the world does not begin and end on the backs of white identity. The drag culture you know absolutely nothing about was primarily pioneered by working class black and latin@ gay and transgender people as early as the 1940′s and earlier. It was, and still is, and will continue to be, despite all of your ahistorical rage, a space and a practice that served self expression, safety, and a form of self-employment for these communities since it was impossible for black and latin@ lgbt people, especially black and latina trans women, to maintain typical jobs. Storme Delarverie, the black lesbian Stonewall veteran, used to perform in drag as an entertainer to produce a living for herself since she was in poverty. Marsha P. Johnson, the black trans woman you and the rest of your detached white queer ilk liken yourselves to in the most grotesque, self-serving and voyeuristic ways possible as though she’s your personal political pawn and not someone who threatened the white supremacist LGBT hegemony you all exhibit every single day, made a living performing in drag shows and being a drag queen as she was homeless. Read up on her history before you invoke her name to support your historical revisionism and your anxious attacks on black and latin@ history.

It’s a testament to white queer selfishness that you can get up on your little tumblr platform and proclaim how you hate drag queens while ignoring how mainstream Gay Inc had pilfered the lives and bodies of black and latin@ people who pioneered drag in this part of the world. Critiquing the transmisogyny, misogyny, and so on of drag queens like RuPaul and others who have stolen drag from its origin and have turned it into mainstream Gay Inc fanfare is fine, but the fact that you all believe that this is the entirety of drag culture and therefore demonize it based upon that erroneous assumption is a repulsive display of the white supremacist onslaught upon black and latin@ gay & trans female history. 

my ideal straight trans relationship where we go super stealth and attend christian rallies undetected to read jack chick tracks before sniping the pastor in our getaway drop top

being extremely sexxi, but asexual

(Making a post about this because I haven’t seen it hit Tumblr yet. Tweets pictured: [first] [second] [third] [fourth] [fifth] [sixth and seventh])

You may have seen this 30,000 note post with a video excerpt from Sylvia Rivera’s famous “y’all better quiet down” speech at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day rally, along with commentary from various trans women on the impact that day had on her and Marsha P Johnson and broader context on the horrible way Sylvia Rivera was treated by white, assimilationist gay organisations and the precursors to trans woman exterminationist feminism.

The video was uploaded in 2012 by Reina Gossett, a Black trans woman whose archival work is integral to our understanding of the lives of trans women of colour such as Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P Johnson and Miss Major who began the gay rights movement. Reina Gossett’s research is the basis for many recent histories of Stonewall, STAR and the struggle in New York, often without proper credit.

The video has now been removed.

In the week of 17 April 2017, the “Lesbian Herstory Archive” made a copyright claim on the video, and Vimeo took it down. Above are tweets from last week by Reina Gossett and others commenting on this use of repressive copyright law to attempt to hide a crucial piece of gay and trans history.