julia

Hi all, a very good friend of mine who currently lives in Tennessee, USA has been trying to save up to move to a better and more accepting environment, most likely Seattle. She is a widowed transfemme who lives alone with her cat she needs to look after as well, and works very long night shifts for a job that makes very little money on her own, sometimes up to 90-hour weeks. it would mean the world to me if she could get a little help.

here is little Tabitha in her element watching over the CRT. you want to help her out right?

gofundme.com/f/help-gwen-get-to-safety

roblox rolls out their age group system, and you can no longer talk to any adults on the platform. you can only talk to people in person, i.e. your parents, who are horrid. now you're back at square one, being helplessly abused. to make it worse, you're homeschooled, as I was. you can't reach out to anyone at school for support either.

or maybe you're not homeschooled, and you ask your pronouns to be used at school. it goes well for a while, and you feel some relief.

then your state passes a bill that requires forced outing. your teachers report to your parents that you've been trying out a different name and pronouns.

they pull you from school, send you to boarding school or conversion therapy, and force you to attend private schools in the future that match their values.

you are entirely under their control. you could've made connections with other adults, ones willing to help you out. to treat you like a human, give you access to life saving care. and it's stripped away, you're alone, and everything feels hopeless.

I liked these tags but I had something to say about it

I already assumed that the dresses were a choice made by the female crew, mostly for my own sanity. They do show (very infrequently) women in tos wearing pants

And they show men wearing dresses in tng, but only ever in the background (unless you count the dress uniforms)

And obviously I like that these were included, but they were clearly a cop out decision.

“Yeah see men can wear dresses, women can wear pants. They just don’t choose to” reads as “of course I’m not sexist, women just like wearing tiny little dresses in the future”

And thinking about it from a late sixties perspective, many women did see more revealing clothes as an empowering choice to make. Men wanted women covered and modest, understated makeup, only exposed or done up for male enjoyment. Some women took that in the opposite direction and chose to wear more extravagant makeup, revealing clothing, and brighter colors. It was a progressive time, and some of the choices made in an attempt to highlight that in the show did not age well.

I think it's worth emphasizing that this very genuinely is the main reason for the "sexist" miniskirts. IRL, women were often not choosing between sexy miniskirts and non-objectifying pants, but long skirts (respectable) and short skirts (rebellious). Deliberately wearing short skirts as rebellion against patriarchal control that mandated long skirts or maaaaybe loose slacks on a good day is still hardly unknown among girls/women leaving conservative communities in the USA, and was only more commonly coded that way at the time.

Sally Kellerman, the actress for Elizabeth Dehner, found the close fit of the supposedly more feminist pants uncomfortable and is often given something to hold in front of her because she was so intensely self-conscious about them. Grace Lee Whitney (Janice Rand) loathed the more "proper" initial look and worked with the (gay) costume designer, William Ware Theiss, to design a different, more daring and cool-looking aesthetic for women of the future that appealed to her personally. That was what resulted in the miniskirt uniform design. No doubt it served the objectifying tastes of various straight men involved, but literally zero of them were responsible for the design of Whitney's and Nichols's uniforms.

Not only did Nichelle Nichols not consider herself suffering from the miniskirt, she admitted later to sometimes deliberately lifting the skirt even higher at Uhura's station to show off more of her legs because she hadn't worked so hard on her body to not show them off. Meanwhile, Jill Ireland, the actress for Leila Kalomi, was nervous that she might have to wear the kinds of revealing costumes so many other TOS actresses did, and Theiss instead designed her the comfortable overalls she wears as Leila in "This Side of Paradise."

The kneejerk backlash against short skirts (in decidedly more reactionary eras of both Star Trek and US culture) led to both the large-scale disappearance of the skirts and the snide commentary on them throughout later iterations of Trek, with zero consideration of the fact that they were designed by a gay man to suit the preferences of the leading actresses at a time when they commonly represented rebellion. The Berman-era Star Trek productions tut-tutting at the old costumes while actually putting actresses in uncomfortable, form-fitting uniforms they disliked is ... uh, something else.