Well don't get on my ass about it!

I work at a library. We do this thing where, every so often, we weed the collection. It hurts to see books go, but it's necessary to make sure there's room in the library for new materials.

I have seen so much support for the library in text, and I've seen folks pass around those beautiful "queer your library" flyers. Keep doing that. That's great. Nothing wrong with that. But you HAVE to turn your words into action. We MUST remember to actually go to our local organizations and libraries and actually, with our own fucking hands, interact with these materials we want to see more of.

My branch is medium-sized for a library, maybe a little small. We don't have as many materials as I'd like, but we have fundamentals. Tell me why, even with all the verbal support I've gotten from my local community for the library as a resource for our LGBT+ community, every single trans biography and a good chunk of our vaguely queer theory books were on the list. This isn't a scheme to take the books off the shelves, it isn't another bigoted American governmental push. The only thing we look at when we weed is how long it's been since the last time the item was checked out.

Three years.

No one in my community interacted in any meaningful way with the few books on trans life and history we physically had on the shelves for three fucking years.

I promise you the materials you want and need are there, but this isn't a horde. This isn't a static safety net. You have to use them. You MUST use them or, in the future, maybe in three years, they *won't* be there anymore.

I'm also a librarian and queer books are almost always cut first when we have to weed for space or prioritize new releases over old items because no one reads them

I will say, when I worked at a large downtown location, we had a "browsing card" that we would check out items we found taken off the shelf and left on a table, as an example of a book that had clearly been read, just not checked out by anyone

it's possible queer books do actually get a bit of unfair treatment in this regard because people may be nervous or outright scared to check them out onto an account with their name on it. so they get browsed at a much higher rate, but if a library doesn't have a specific system in place (or need for it) to count browsed items, then it looks like they aren't being used and they get weeded

for other librarians, a browsing card is a great idea if you have enough staff for the extra work / enough items left out to justify it

for patrons, check out queer books even if you don't read them! you're not lying or committing any type of fraud. you're keeping books on the shelf long enough for pride season when people are interested in checking them out again and for people scared to use their own accounts or who don't have library cards

for anyone nervous about using their library card, libraries do not keep search histories of what you check out!! this means even if the government does come back with a warrant, *wet farting noise* too bad! it doesn't exist!

It feels like such a small thing, but all movements are made up of small things! We have this mindset that in order to get everything done, everyone must be doing their (or *the*) absolute best at all times. But not everyone can do the same things, to the same degree, with the same amount of productivity or success. Not everyone can; sometimes, they're the ones that need help. Sometimes people just need help.

This post is very much so intended for the people who can. I've seen a lot of replies from folks who say they don't have to (or don't think about) checking out or requesting queer books from the library specifically because they *can* buy them, can pirate them, or already have them in their house or on their computers or phones. But in instances like that, keeping these books in circulation is less for you and more for the people who can't. The folks who come to the library, who don't have access to internet--or even electricity--at home and would never--have never--been able to interact with this "ubiquitous queer community" we have here online who has made so many of these. materials so avaliable to the rest of us.

And... if I can be a little frank. Sometimes the hyperaccessibility of these materials online (through pirating, cheap e-book copies, etc) gives people a false sense of security. It implies that these things are an infinate resource, good for "When I get around to it".

And often, you won't. There's so much to read and so much to do. So much to download and so much to sit down and stare at for hours. That kind of mental scope puts books in people's hands (or phones), but never in their heads.

I live in a province that is currently trying to ban queer books from libraries, and as a library patron, this is terrifying. 95% of the books I read are from the library and a lot of them are way out of my budget to buy personally.

Making Queer History would not exist without the school library I skipped class in to write articles. It would not exist without my friends with library cards for their universities sharing them and getting me access to rare texts. I would not be able to read as much as I do without Libby and Hoopla. If I have ever given you a book recommendation, know that I likely got it from the library first.

I cannot overstate the importance of protecting libraries and checking out queer books. And I want to say thank you to everyone above for being as passionate as I am about queer books in libraries.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

First: THIS RECALL IS NOT STATE SPECIFIC. IT IS NATIONWIDE.

here are the specific products and dates:

FDA page on this:

we desire instant gratification

patience is a learned skill

fomo is fake urgency. something good will still be there in 5 years

we have a cult of youth that sees older people as useless or ugly

actual artists never stop learning and growing and it takes years

In the USA, the average age of professional musicians is 45 for men and 51 for women.

Working musicians go to school for it, master one or many instruments, learn theory and technique, and practice every day. These are the people who work in orchestras, on soundtracks, as session players, as music teachers, and some as songwriters and arrangers, etc, but not necessarily for themselves.

Like, we’ve been conditioned to think it’s normal that people emerge as fully formed pop stars at a young age - particularly by the Disney Channel-to-Hollywood Records pipeline for former child stars.

Can you create really good art without some insight into life and the human condition? Do you have something to say about art itself (medium, form, instruments, etc)?

bless thats ok! dont worry! <3

so, its from a strip of the ongoing comic called ‘loss.jpeg’

which looks like this!

[image is from Know Your Meme!]

it became quite infamous, mainly because it was [in the majority’s opinion] a very poorly executed comic dealing with quite a serious scenario

there is an excellent post that explains why people didn’t like it, but i havent been able to find it! if anyone does please feel free to link it! it would really help! 

so the positioning of the characters in each panel became a meme…which in turn became a staple of meme culture that, to some, is instantly recognisable

i hope this helps in some way! <3 

The strips were relatively popular, if criticised for being lazy in the art department (which they… really REALLY were) and were generally rather unfunny “gamer humour” like the early Penny Arcade strips. (there’s a good post on tumblr somewhere that shows if you remove the 2 middle panels from the 4 panel strips the comic is actually funny in a completely nonsensicle way)

Anyway, at some point the author decided to start introducing some storyline into the comic, the biggest being Main Character and Girl getting married and her being pregnant. this would be sprinkled with more gamer humour and him being a man-child and her being annoyed by his goofiness (but still putting up with him and being his mom essentially)

This all changed when, out of NOWHERE, the strip called “Loss” was published.

This strip shows Girl has had a miscarriage.

This absolute out of nowhere TRAINSMASH of a “serious issue” strip in a GAMER GAG COMIC is why it’s so remembered. Because this was a funny haha kinda lame gamer comic and then suddenly we’re having plot points about women having missacarriages.

Not helped when, in the VERY NEXT STRIP, Main character is all like

at the hospital because “LOL RANDOM”.

the comic “Loss” became such an absolute joke due to the author’s complete and utter lack of tact regarding such a heavy issue. But also because the author himself is kind of a giant douche. Completely and utterly convinced of his own genius, he created a charity JUST to compete with Penny Arcade’s charity, he bans people on the CAD forums if they have ANYTHING negative to say about his comics, and constantly vandalising wikipedia pages about other webcomics to insult them.

So you have a giant trash fire of 1) an asshole author who thinks he’s hot shit but has a fragile ego 2) a kind of shitty webcomic that’s not actually that funny but got popular when “gamers” was a big thing on the internet in the early 2000s and 3) a complete disaster of a “dramatic moment” handled with complete lack of sensitivity.

To the point if you go to lectures and panels on creating webcomics, the “Don’t introduce real human drama if your comic was created to be a comedy” comes up PURELY to reference this particular strip

The comic has become so parodied and referenced, that over tha past 9 or 10 years (yes it REALLY has been going for that long) the strip “Loss” has become so recogniseable that it can be simplified to the collection of lines Coco referenced. And in turn those lines themselves have become a meme, people sneaking them into pictures and images and finding newer and more abstract ways to reference this comic, so the “hidden Loss reference” has itself become its own meme. To the point where it’s even being referenced in actual media these days.

Reposting these tags with consent from the person that wrote them. The post about the Sex Offenders Registry is locked, but these tags are too important to go unnoticed.

When you hear people throwing around the talking point of “well there’s a high rate of sex offenders in the trans/queer community”, this has to do with why.

Being on the sex offender registry isn’t inherently equivalent to whatever horrific sex crime you’re meant to think of when it’s mentioned. It evokes imagery of pedophilia and rape, but there is a lot that can get you put on it and not a lot you can do to be taken off of it.

Public crossdressing used to be able to get you put on the sex offender registry (and by used to I mean as recently as 2011).

Public urination (you know, the literal only option for someone who’s homeless and doesn’t have access to public bathrooms, a venn diagram where trans people are more likely to rest in the meeting zone) can get you put on the sex offender registry.

Sex work is pretty much an automatic way to end up on the sex offender registry if you’re caught. (This is especially weaponized against black trans women who do sex work)

“Deviant Sexual Intercourse” (aka literally any sexual activity aside from penis-in-vagina penetration) could get you on the sex offender registry as recently as the early 2000s. That effectively impacts the entire queer community in one way or another.

The sex offender registry is, first and foremost, useless. It tells you nothing about what someone did. It’s mentioned to quickly associate a person or a group of people with the worst possible crimes imaginable.

Since the war, my life has changed completely… my father was martyred, and I became the sole provider for my mother and my younger siblings. Every day I try to secure food and safety for them despite displacement, fear, and loss 💔

I have been married for 3 years to the woman I love deeply, and our biggest dream was to become parents 👶🏻

But after long attempts and many doctor visits, we learned that we need IVF treatment, and its cost is far beyond what I can afford.

My wife cries silently every night, afraid that our dream may never come true. I try to stay strong for her and for my family, even though exhaustion fills our hearts 🌧️

Sometimes it feels like the war has taken everything from us… our home, our safety, and even our simplest dreams 🕊️

But despite everything, we are still holding on to hope and trying not to give up.

All we ask for is a small chance at life 🤍

Any support, no matter how small, could make a huge difference in our lives. This is my link, and I kindly ask for your help.