I'm not interested in Einstein's brain

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Roronoa Zoro icons — requested *:･ﾟ✧

★ one piece ★ 

if a woman creates something mediocre, or if a woman’s a bad leader it becomes about how “all women are bad at _____,” or about how “no woman is a natural leader”

When I was about 14, I once befriended, and lost contact with, a 40 year old woman with a full head of gray, curly hair, who was one of the best known Good Omens fan artists of the community. She had apparently been in and out of asylums for years, and I worried for the longest time. I even sent her an email when I was around 18, asking after her well-being. But then she resurfaced when I was 21, here on tumblr. It was one of the greatest and most memorable fandom experiences I’ve ever had. 

When I was 15 and using slurs I didn’t know were slurs, 30+ year old LGBTQ+ comics fans on scans_daily patiently but firmly corrected me. I felt mortified, but they never attacked me or treated me as anything other than a dumb kid who made a mistake. 

I have a long time friend of close to a decade, who was late twenties when I met her in the comics fandom, and I was a teen.

OLDER FANS ARE CRUCIAL TO THE SURVIVAL OF FANDOMS. Not ONLY because they’re literally the ones keeping fandom afloat (AO3 wasn’t created or maintained by kids, let’s just say), but because older fans generally don’t attack or bully or fuck up a fandom by being aggressive or volatile or overzealous, destroying any enjoyment of a medium. 

Single women, married women, LGBTQ+ fans, all in the range of 30-60 years old. I’ve met all sorts of older fans, from when I was 12 on deviantart to now, in my mid-twenties, and not a single one of them has ever hurt me or treated me like dirt. I’ve always felt safer with older fans than with younger ones, because of the people I’ve seen harass, accuse, doxx, bully, and generally engage in harmful behaviour in this fandom, they’ve largely been in the 13-21 age bracket. 

Obviously most young fans aren’t like that, but the toxicity is palpable regardless.

@younger fans, if somebody older in a fandom acts in a creepy way, then feel free to avoid them, block them, report them.

I made my Question Time debut last week as a Labour MP. I was asked about Theresa May, about Brexit, about allegations of rape and how to deal with them and about statues of Margaret Thatcher. I talked about my work as a constituency MP, and as the longest-serving member of the Treasury Select Committee. I discussed my work against child sexual exploitation and abuse and spoke about the economy and immigration. And yet, when I looked at my phone, I found I had received anti-Jewish abuse and an antisemitic death threat on social media. I am not Jewish, I didn’t talk about Jews and I didn’t discuss the Middle East.

This isn’t the first time. I can speak out about knife crime and drugs and the tweets come in – “who is paying you to do your work” “Why don’t you admit you’re in the pay of the Israeli government” and the like. It is not just tweets though. One Labour party member called me a “CIA *******” for dealing with the “antisemitism nonsense” following an appearance I made on the Daily Politics at Labour party conference talking about the Brexit. Not all, but the vast majority of these attacks have come from self-identified “left-wing” activists or Labour party supporters.

Anti-Jewish hate and invective is becoming so obsessive, so fervent that irrespective of what an anti-racist activist is discussing, antisemitism is the online reaction. Last week, Phillip Collins, in the Times, highlighted the problem of Left wing antisemitism and the obsessive hate of Israel. He pointed out that most of the statements people make are not actionable. The death threat I received will be, but much of the abuse fell into the other category. As he said: the “tone of voice, the severity, the passion, the elevation of an issue that should be one among many to a defining idea of political identity.” ”It connects to a loathing of America and of capitalism and of alleged western interference in the Middle East. For the uncomplicated racist, hatred of the undesirable people is the starting point. For the complicated, confused leftist, the denigration of a people is their conclusion.”

But now it’s one step further. There’s a group-focussed enmity. Anyone who calls out racism, or seeks to address anti-Jewish hatred is a target. It’s even now the case that allegations of antisemitism are being inferred or created and attributed to Jews in order to try and diminish the charge when one has not been made. This of course, undermines victims of antisemitism and their right to define such abuse and call out the abusers.

If you have had the misfortune of engaging these racist Twitter trolls, it won’t be long before you find some patterns emerging. It starts with talk of “Zionism” and quickly leads to allegations of the Holocaust being “rammed down our throats” and support for Holocaust revisionism. There is an antisemitic sickness, particularly afflicting the left, and it is spreading.

…I expect Labour to call out the anti-Semites. When someone with a public platform in the party tweets a racist slur or alleges antisemitism is fabricated, they must be called out. Each and every Labour MP has a duty to speak. We cannot ask other party’s to deal with issues of antisemitism in their parties if we don’t call it out in our own.

…We all have a responsibility to call out antisemitism. Any MP should be able to appear on a public show about the key policy issues of our time without being subjected to racist abuse. If we can’t defeat racism, then it’s not the politicians we need to be questioning but rather our future as a civilised society.

I’ve been off insurance for the last three or so years and have been working around through channel I can to continue to obtain insulin and supplies for my insulin pump (of which is currently a problem, fun) for free or at reduced costs.

The Lilly Cares program is one I heavily endorse if your insulin is a Lilly product. They’ve been incredibly helpful to me.

These days one bottle of insulin costs me approx $600 (before insurance) and lasts 2-3 weeks, tops. Less than ten years ago the cost was closer to $200/bottle. The insulin manufacturers keep “tweaking” insulins like Humalog so the patents can be extended(*), so we don’t even have access to a generic option.

The price gouging on insulin in this country is cruel and damn disgusting.

Please, please boost this info. It WILL save lives.

I’ve been wavering back and forth on whether or not I should post this because it’s very personal and possibly not as informed as I would like it to be. And it requires a little prefacing.

I’m nonbinary.

I write nonbinary characters. (I don’t have a single story which doesn’t include at least a protagonist or love interest who’s nonbinary, usually with a number of nonbinary supporting characters.) 

And these nonbinary characters come in all forms and styles and pronouns and self presentations, from humans who believe they aren’t defined by anyone else’s perception of their gender, to characters whose entire society doesn’t differentiate between male and female, to agender demi-gods who use gendered pronouns because they feel like it and their to genderfluid parents who wear dresses to the opera.

Through the process of writing these characters I’ve subjected them to quite a few beta readers. And what I see in my feedback is a consistent trend of binary readers worried over whether my portrayals of nonbinary character might come off as offensive, while nonbinary readers don’t bat an eye. 

Now, I’m certainly not saying that it’s bad for people of binary genders to be critical of how nonbinary characters are portrayed, because I love having people watching out for me and my nonbinary fam.

But I’m also worried.

I’m worried that binary writers aren’t writing nonbinary characters because they’re afraid of getting it wrong.

If binary writers are worried a nonbinary writer is getting their own representation wrong, then how much more are they criticizing themselves for perceived flaws in their own nonbinary characters?

Please: Write nonbinary characters. Specifically, write nonbinary protagonists and love interests.

There is such a broad scale of nonbinary identifying individuals, who’ve all had very different experiences, who all present themselves in different ways, with different pronouns, for different reasons. We are more diverse than you can imagine.

And yet we have essentially no representation. We are dying, dying, for characters in fiction who’s similar to us. The most devastating way you can mess up is to not care enough to try in the first place.

Edit: 

I’ve had this post sitting in my drafts for a day because I needed to edit it and boy. Boy am I pissed.

Just fucking pissed.

After having a binary person (one who only writes a nonbinary villain no less) attempt to call out my #ownvoice representation, I couldn’t be more angry. 

(I mean, I could be more angry, as proven by that time a TERF broke into my personal messages to write me two essays on why my identity isn’t real and I actually just hate myself enough to pretend it is, but that’s a different story altogether.)

So I amend this:

Please, please write nonbinary characters. But please, for the love of all things good, don’t try to tell other writers how to write these nonbinary characters if you aren’t also nonbinary. 

Write us characters but don’t fucking step on us in the process.