There's just one kind of folks. Folks.

no

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Starting next month, new parents in Germany will no longer be required to designate their newborn children as either male or female.

In an effort to be more inclusive of intersex individuals, Germany will allow parents to leave the gender box blank on their baby’s birth certificate if they so choose. The law takes effect on November 1.

With babies reportedly born without clearly determinable genitalia at a rate of 1 in every 1,500 – and many intersex individuals not exhibiting characteristics until later in life – the legislation seeks “to take the pressure off parents to commit themselves to a gender immediately after birth.”

“This will be the first time that the law acknowledges that there are human beings who are neither male nor female, or are both,” stated University of Bremen law professor Konstanze Plett. “People who do not fit into the traditional legal categories… We will have fellow human beings with no sex registered. They can’t be forced into either one of the traditional sexes in these other contexts.”

Earlier this year, the United Nations condemned “normalization” surgery, citing research that surgeries aiming to create an either anatomically male or female bodyfor intersex infants often leads to more harm than help.

The German law reportedly states that if a child “cannot be assigned to the female nor the male gender,” their status “shall be entered without such information in the register of births.”

People who:

a) resent attempts to manipulate them into reblogging a post. 

First of all, I apologize for this post being a bit late. I was JUST ABOUT to upload it when the internet at my house cut out. This should not have been a surprise, given all the various technical difficulties in the US yesterday…

Anyways… today’s comic deals with one of the more interesting topics in contemporary Shakespeare studies: Original Pronunciation!

O.P. and the amazing ways in which it has been reconstructed, deserve a lot more space than six stick-figure comic panels, but hey, barbarically reducing things of great literary and scholarly merit to their bare bones is kind of my “thing”. At the very least, now you know that when Hamlet tries to rhyme “move” and “love”, it’s not actually him pretending to be mad.

The super-linguist in question is David Crystal, whose praises I repeatedly sung. In his O.P. endeavors he has been ably assisted by his son, Ben Crystal, an actor who, armed with Shakespeare’s O.P., can make the prologue of Romeo and Juliet sound sexier and more piratical than you could have ever imagined. If you don’t believe, just take a listen:

Seriously. That’s gorgeous. Here’s a longer video, featuring Papa Crystal and Ben at the Globe:

It’s easy to get snobbish about Shakespeare and to believe it works only when performed in the elegantly trained received pronunciation of an Ian McKellen or a Benedict Cumberbatch. But, as the Crystals point out, received pronunciation is even further away from Shakespeare’s original accent than American are from it.

Passion in Practice - Theatre company founded by Ben Crystal, does awesome OP productions. Or at least I assume they’re awesome, but they haven’t come on tour to Michigan yet. What’s up with that, Ben?

Being mindful of these is what puts you on the path to recovery. If you’re mindful, you are able to live in that moment and try your best to remember these better options.

biphobia is the constant mockery of young girls with “bi” in their bios, as if their identity isn’t valid because they are too young to know.

biphobia is the fact that lesbians are allowed to call their hatred of bi women a “preference” despite the fact that it’s ridiculously hurtful and based entirely on stereotypes. 

biphobia is present simply in how many people refuse to believe that bisexuality is anything more than a phase.

biphobia is the way that bi people are excluded both from the straight community AND the queer community, a community where they are supposed to be safe and accepted.

biphobia is the fact that bi kids are often terrified off accepting their sexualities because they’ve so often been told that they can either be “one or the other.”

biphobia is the myth of straight passing privilege.

biphobia is being told that being bi means you are inherently transphobic.

biphobia is the supported, and almost expected open hatred of bisexuals from both the gay and lesbian communities.

biphobia is the gatekeeper complex that gay and lesbian people have about the queer community.

biphobia is the fact that every time I’ve spoken up about this, a gay or lesbian person will instantly butt in and talk about how “they have it worse.”