call me Adaptus the way Pharma lives rent free in my brain

Listen to me: I genuinely, wholeheartedly, with my entire being hope that anyone and everyone who wants the ability to give birth is someday able to make that dream a reality. When that day comes, I will genuinely be ecstatic for everyone who's able to have that procedure they've been waiting so long for. When transandrophobes say this to me, I imagine they must think this is something I'm opposed to, but I'm not! If having the ability to give birth or menstruate would be gender-affirming for you, then I'd really like nothing more than for you to get that ability. Truly. And I don't say this to be like, "then you can finally understand my pain!" Like, no, I want trans people to get whatever gender-affirming care would make them the happiest. I understand that the pain is worth it when it makes you the truest, most actualized version of yourself. When that day comes and if I'm still alive, genuinely come abduct me in my sleep and just take my uterus. Steal my womb. My eggs are all yours. I'll be first in line to donate all this shit I don't need or want.

But the thing is, right? We aren't bringing it up to be mean. When we bring up the fact that a lot of us still have gynecological needs, or that many of us are still capable of getting pregnant, or that not all of us can get gender-affirming care, let alone healthcare that's still typically seen as being "only for women," it's not because we want trans fems and trans women to feel bad. We were accused of not having it as bad as trans fems, of having systemic privilege comparable or equal to pericis men, and we're providing examples of how that's just not true. That's all.

And maybe it's hard to hear, if the ability to menstruate or give birth is desirable to you, that we'd prefer not to have it, or that it causes problems for us. We aren't saying anyone is bad for wanting what we don't. All we're saying is that it's one of the ways in which we absolutely don't have male privilege. Especially those of us who don't pass or are staying closeted for our own safety.

But I think that's not really why there's pushback against this. It just can't be refuted that trans mascs and trans men are not cis men. We're men or possess masculinity, yes, but we're not cis men. And, as far as a patriarchal society is concerned, men who are not cis aren't men at all. We won't be treated like pericis men by most unless we pass well enough. Even then, the second we're outed, that all collapses.

Society at large still sees me as a woman. A lot of people who themselves are transgender still see me as a woman, too. I feel like trans mascs are held to a weird standard where no amount of gender performance in any direction is enough. If we present too masculine, we're "scary," but if we're not masculine enough, we must not want it that badly or we're "misgendering" ourselves for nefarious purposes.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/27/received-death-threats-abandoning-pro-palestine-movement/

It wasn’t long after Hamas carried out its attack on Israel in Oct 7, 2023, that Taryn Thomas found herself swept up in the chorus of pro-Palestine activists mobilising against the Jewish state.

Even before Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza following the Oct 7 massacre,“I was scrolling through social media, and I only saw support for Palestine,” she recalls. “People I know, whether it was activists or people I look up to, were already posting their thoughts.”

Then aged 19 and studying biomedical science at the elite Stanford University in northern California, Thomas, an African American, was first introduced to the anti-Israel movement at Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, where Palestinian flags were flown by some activists. “I never really understood why, but we were told that in order for us to be free, Palestine has to be free,” she says.

She subsequently helped lead large protests against Israel and, within two weeks of Oct 7 2023, had joined an encampment of activists on campus protesting against Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Like many others, she donned a keffiyeh, the headscarf worn to demonstrate solidarity with Palestinians. “I really loved it because of the sense of belonging and the sense of purpose,” she says of the encampment. “It was like an instant community.”

Besides fellow students, Thomas was encouraged by “faculty members like history professors” who “validated the movement”. “It seemed like everyone was a lot more educated than me and very certain and sure of themselves that this is a genocide,” says Thomas, who is now 21. “The only safe position was the more radical one in the encampment.”

‘I was confused by what our mission was’

Thomas grew up in Riverside County, one of the few Republican counties in the otherwise “very liberal California”. That, together with racist abuse at school, influenced her political outlook. “I thought going further to the Left would be the solution to the extremism I was seeing from the Right,” she says.

Huge demonstrations took place at universities across the US in the months that followed Oct 7, with protesters confronting the educational institutions with their demands – including to divest from Israel and cut ties with counterpart Israeli institutions.

While the movement was largely peaceful, some demonstrations turned violent and led to clashes with police. “One of our protests got out of hand, and that kind of made me take a step back,” says Thomas.

This was in June 2024, when several militant students broke into the office of Stanford’s president, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. “They spray-painted disgusting things, such as ‘Pigs taste best when dead’, ‘Death to America’, ‘Death to Israel’, and ‘Kill cops’,” Thomas recalls.

“I was confused by what our mission was. At what point did the pro-Palestine movement turn into this anti-Israel, anti-America movement? We completely lost sight of the victims we were claiming to be supporting and fighting for.”

Yet those behind the vandalism “doubled down”, she says, and justified their actions, “even though Jewish students said they felt unsafe”. She explains: “They felt like they couldn’t go to their classes, they were getting harassed and doxxed [having personal information published online] and things like that. Essentially, we completely lost our minds.”

A drastic change of heart

Then, in October 2024, Thomas was one of many students who received an open invitation to the Nova Music Festival Exhibition in Los Angeles. Recently opened in London, the exhibition aims to recreate the festival site where 413 people were murdered by Hamas, and many more were injured or taken hostage.

Nova exhibition

The recently opened Nova exhibition in London commemorates the 413 young people murdered by Hamas at the festival Credit: Jeff Gilbert

“Initially, I laughed, thinking, ‘What’s this propaganda?’” Something piqued her interest, however, so she decided to go. “I’d heard about the festival and was curious, but I’d only really heard the reasoning, ‘Well, why would you have a festival next to a contested border? Essentially, they were asking for it.’

“I was hoping it was going to reaffirm my position, that I would find Zionist lies and whatever. I went with a very closed mind.” Three hours later, Thomas emerged feeling “so lost”.

“I experienced a lot of cognitive dissonance – what I was seeing versus what I’d been told. It was like I arrived a year too late to a funeral. I had so many questions, but I really had no one I could talk to about this. All of my friends were from the encampment. I’d never met an Israeli or talked to them about their experiences – I was fluent in the state’s sins, but I was illiterate in its people.”

Seeing pictures and footage of the young festival-goers hit home for Thomas. “They were kids my age, just dancing, and then fleeing for their lives the next moment. I could see myself in them. I could have been sending a last ‘I love you’ message to my mum. I felt so much empathy and sadness.”

One element in particular changed everything – an audio clip of a jubilant Hamas fighter phoning his father to let him know he’d killed 10 Jews. “My heart sank because these [were meant to be] our martyrs. [This was] the resistance we were claiming we wanted. When we called for any means necessary, I didn’t realise that’s what it meant.”

Months later, Thomas was invited on a trip to Israel organised by a group combatting anti-Semitism on campus. “I knew if I was going to continue to speak on this, I needed to see it for myself,” she says.

During the 10-day trip last March, she met with Israelis, Ethiopian Jews, Palestinians, Druze and Bedouin. “I was shocked at how much diversity I saw – I didn’t even know Israel had black people,” she said.

On the fourth day, the group had to take cover during a missile attack. “Our guide told us to get on the ground, and I put my hands over my neck and prayed. “I thought about the irony of how I’d called for the divestment of the very system I was praying for,” she says. “It [the missile] didn’t care about my politics or what I posted or any of that. I was a target, a body on the ground, and I felt utterly useless.”

Fortunately the missile was intercepted and the trip continued, but the experience left Thomas shaken. She says it made her realise “how cushy and comfortable a life” she had in America, and that she’d not realised the “real consequences” of what she’d been calling for.

‘It felt like being stoned publicly’

Back home, she posted a picture of her trip online – a decision that cost her dearly. “My best friend of three years asked, ‘Is this in Israel?’ I said, ‘Yeah, do you want to talk about it?’ She immediately blocked me. I hadn’t even expressed anything. I literally said I went. Period.”

Her post opened the floodgates. “I lost every single friend”, while her classmates “posted really disgusting things”, including labelling her a “genocidal apologist”. Thomas says she was doxxed, and received death threats and racist abuse – and that her family was also targeted. “It was like a crusade and felt like being stoned publicly.”

She now takes a dim view of the encampment atmosphere. “It completely insulates you in this echo chamber and indoctrinates you. If you had any questions, you’d lose your social belonging – the last thing you wanted to be called was a Zionist.”

She adds that the protesters’ “attention turned into this hatred” and there were constant calls for the “normalisation of violence”. Some activists, for example, celebrated the assassinations of Charlie Kirk, the Right-wing political activist, and Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare chief executive, she says.

The mental toll had become so heavy on Thomas that she stepped away from her studies late last year. What helped get her through this tough period is the new friendships she has formed, including some with Jewish students.

“They knew I came from the encampments and they engaged with me, intellectually argued with me, disagreed with me, but we still broke bread on Shabbat,” she says. “I learned from my [now] best friend that she was doxxed because of people within our movement. I know I have to repair some of those damages.”

‘Open your heart and put down those megaphones’

Thomas says her family are not politically engaged in the issue of Israel and Gaza and she has faced questions from her mother about her involvement. “She was just like, ‘Why are you doing this? It isn’t your burden to shoulder.’ She just wants her family to be safe and protected.”

But Thomas hopes that by sharing her story it will encourage others to experience the Nova exhibition. “I hope the people who are protesting will come – I just want them to go inside,” she says. “None of this is political. Just look and learn the stories – you don’t have to agree. Come in with an open heart and an open mind and put down those megaphones.”

As for Thomas, she hopes to return to university in September, but in the meantime, she is determined to do what she can to increase cross-community understanding. “A lot of us on the pro-Palestine side were recruited through empathy, so I think we can be reached through it too. Because of this unique perspective I have of what changed my heart, I think I can hopefully change other people’s.

Sadiq Khan visits the Nova Exhibition in London

The London Mayor drew parallels between the music festival massacre and 2017’s Manchester Arena Bombing.

He said: "This is not about what religion you belong to, which God you worship, what your politics are, what your views are on any particular issues, it's about coming to see for yourself what happened on that day,” said Khan.

London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan visited the Nova Exhibition on Thursday, meeting with bereaved families of October 7 victims visiting the capital.

Khan toured the exhibition alongside relatives of those killed at the Nova Music Festival, one of the key epicentres of Hamas’ attack on Israel in 2023.

The delegation was also accompanied by Andrea Simon, the victims’ commissioner for London, part of the UK’s independent agency dedicated to the welfare of victims of atrocities and public scandals and their families.

During the visit, the mayor urged others to visit the exhibition, which tells the story of the infamous massacre.

As well as featuring personal items salvaged from the festival grounds, the exhibition also includes first-hand witness phone footage from the day and in-person testimonies from survivors, returned hostages, and bereaved families – who will be present at the exhibition every day.

"This is not about what religion you belong to, which God you worship, what your politics are, what your views are on any particular issues, it's about coming to see for yourself what happened on that day,” said Khan.

"But if you're lucky, you’ll get the chance to meet a survivor and that experience will touch you, I promise.

“What's quite clear is that these are people who went to that concert with nothing but love and joy, wanted a good time, and lost their lives. Others have survived. Their lives are never going to be the same again. And there are bereaved families whose lives will never be the same again."

"A number of things won't leave me,” he added, specifically mentioning “the trainers of the kids, one of them 18 years old, the clothes, mobile phones”.

“It just reminds you these are people, and it's always worth remembering that you may see a video film, you may read an article, but these are just human beings,” he went on. “But also what people are capable of doing is just horrific. And so what will stay with me is the hope and the optimism, but also the horror of what happened.”

The mayor also drew parallels with the Manchester Arena Bombing, saying: “One of the things I noticed, when you look at the photographs of those who lost their lives, you'll see the diversity of ages - from kids as young as 18, in their 20s and their 30s and their 40s, even in their 50s, whose common theme was their love of trance music, their love of rave.

"And they left home, leaving their loved ones behind expecting to see them the next day, never to return and the same happened with traumatic incidents all across the world whether it's the tragedy of the Ariana Grande concert where those mums and dads never saw their kids again, or the survivors who will be changed forever, it's just a reminder of the things we've got in common.

"There are too many people around the world trying to divide people, divide communities and music, fun, congregation are the things we all share.”

The Nova will be available to visit until Wednesday, July 15, at 30 Curtain Road, London, EC2A 3NZ. Tickets can be purchased at www.novaexhibition.com.

But anime and video game boob jiggling is like. The most uncanny valley shit I've ever seen nine times out of ten. You would think people this horny about tits would have actually looked at some but I guess not.

I’m not saying racism is okay by any means but I wanna emphasize that there’s an intention behind that type of discourse “randomly” gaining attention…

Because when you write that “Argentina is spiritually Israeli” you’re contributing to the narrative the U.S is trying to build.

They’re prepping the world so you guys feel comfortable with Israel taking over Argentina (which they’re already doing!!!), burning down the Patagonia, stealing our resources (like water which is now under Mekorot, an Israeli company), messing with our laws!! (Peter Thiel’s team are already behind the SUPERRIGI), dragging us to wars we don’t support!!

The same way the U.S is using Messi and the World Cup to distract Argentinians!! This is not a conspiracy, this is putting two and two together!! Also this HAS HAPPENED ALREADY DURING THE ARGENTINIAN DICTATORSHIP IN 1978!!!

The U.S intervened with Plan Cóndor (which led to the DARKEST chapter of Argentinian history), installed a violent military regime, while simultaneously we hosted and won the World Cup!! And of course Videla (dictator) used that as a way to tell the world we were fiiiine 🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽.

It is public information that the U.S. government began operations to take down Cristina Kirchner (who is now arrested under a made-up crime), and that Milei’s campaign was funded by right wingers in the U.S!!! There’s a reason why our own president (Milei) and his employees/ influencers keep reinforcing racist language in order to promote colonialism, imperialism, cipayismo and U.S/ Israeli interventions.

LMAO wait I just looked it up. Your entire ecosystem, including the water, is in trouble because of the climate crisis.

Your government went, "Wait, Israel has decades of experience inventing technology to manage water for millions of people in a fucking desert. Israelis invented drip irrigation, water desalination plants, and now have technology that reclaims water from the air. Maybe we could get some of those people to be contractors for us and develop plans for US to manage OUR water!"

And you chucklefucks are genuinely so racist that you immediately assumed anyone from Israel must be stealing your water. Thieving Jews stereotype much?

Not only did a ton of you immediately buy the deliberate lie that the French referee was Jewish, even though you guys WON that match, but you guys also decided that Israel came over to Argentina, used grenades to start wildfires, and then went home, which there's literally no evidence or reason for.

And apparently this is an ONGOING, decades-long conspiracy theory saying that Israel wants to create, what - a second country, thousands of miles away, on land it has zero connection to, where two countries already exist?

First action figure post thing

I don't label my politics, but I'm what someone would call on the left. I spent my teenage years when Tumblr social justice was at its height. I learned things, checked my own biases, and I would like to think became a more empathetic person because of what I learnt from online progressive spaces.

The way these spaces have treated Jewish communities over the past 2.5 years has been nothing short of fucking appalling.

The worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust was minimised, denied, justified, or outright celebrated.

Jewish people were immediately told to put their grief and trauma over this to away, because Palestine's pain was more important to talk about.*

Jewish and Israeli people were told they needed to try and understand why armed men raped, tortured, and killed members of their community. Because, you know, the murderous rapists are who we need to have sympathy for here. Anyone can be pushed to the point of, I don't know, murdering a young woman and parading her corpse around a street for men to spit on her dead body. If you really think about it, isn't that actually kind of an understandable thing to do?

When raising concerns over the rising antisemitism that was starting to look a lot like the build-up to that little historical tidbit called The Holocaust, Jews were told they were selfish for raising the issue.

When asking people not to call for intifadas that have historically resulted in thousands of dead Jews, they're told they're taking it all the wrong way.

When Israeli victims spoke of the abuse they received on Oct 7 and in captivity, they're told they need to stay silent because otherwise they risk justifying the genocide of Palestinians.

When 15 people were murdered at a Hannukah festival, there were no social media icons, no surge from progressive groups to find out what support they needed.

To be clear here, progressive groups seem more concerned with antisemitism in the Harry Potter books than they are about the actual, you know, string of dead Jews that have been murdered over the past few years. If you condemn antisemitic representations in diction and then turn around and completely ignore real-life fucking murder, then I'm sorry I genuinely do not think you ever gave a shit about fighting antisemitism, you just wanted to fight Jk Rowling. **

Absolutely fuck everyone who has justified or denied what happened on Oct 7th. There were ways to advocate for both Israeli and Palestinian victims, but the people who should have known better have ensured that Oct 7th wasn't just one day of hell for Jewish communities, but that its been currently 2.5 years of hell that seems to just be getting worse.

And the most infuriating part is the people who did justify Oct 7th will never admit they were wrong, because that would mean admitting they argued that the murder rape mutilation torture and kidnap of a Jewish community was acceptable, and that would break their brains. I mean it. The cognitive dissonance between believing you are someone who cares for human rights, whilst also being someone who justified all of that, is too great. The brain will always protect itself. Its why people are currently doubling down on there being no rapes on Oct 7th. Rape is not resistance, it is not self defence, it is not landback, it is not right of return, it is not decolonisation, it is not any of the shit people tell themselves Oct 7th was. Rape is just rape. It is just men torturing people (mainly women) for no other reason than because they enjoy it. You will never see these people admitting rape occurred, because the second they do is the second they realise just how horrifically they have behaved.

And it's not getting better. Hate crimes and murders of worldwide Jewish communities are rising. Jewish people are looking to leave places like the US, UK and Australia, which were once considered some of the safest places for them to live. A KKK slur (zio) is now common online usage. Jewish people are expected to sever any connection to an important part of their culture (Israel/Hebrew) in order to be treated somewhat civily. The more IDF crimes are uncovered in Gaza, the more worldwide Jewish communities bear the brunt of the anger. Typing 'Jewish' into any social media brings you into an absolute clusterfuck of the most horrific things you can possibly see people say about their fellow human beings.

I am just sick and exhausted and furious and it feels like I'm hitting my fists against a brick wall that is not knocking down. How do you even get people to realise how bad this is????

I am not Jewish. I know full well that Jewish people talking about all of this get ignored. I know full well that a Jewish person standing up for Palestine gets thousands of notes, and a Jewish person standing up for their own people barely breaks 100. I know full well that Jewish people are being smeared as paranoid or crazy or selfish. I know full well that non-Jewish people speaking up about antisemitism is taken more seriously than Jewish people talking about their own experiences.

Can you all just start fucking having some fucking empathy for Jewish and Israeli communities who have been facing the worst 2 years of their lives. Fucking please. It is not that fucking hard to feel empathy for lots of groups at once. To empathise with both Palestine and Israel, Muslims and Jews. Empathy for all is part of what brings us away from just being animals and makes us human.

If you can't do it, it is not an issue with Jews or Israelis or Zionists or the IDF, it is an issue with you.

*I am not saying Palestinian pain isn't important to raise awareness of, and the people fearing what the IDF would do immediately after Oct 7th were right to raise it. I'm saying asking Jewish communities to take on the trauma of Palestinians, when they were still reeling from their own inter-community trauma, was wrong and unhelpful. I wouldn't ask Palestinian communities to have centered the trauma of Oct 7th either. Trauma is not a competition and everyone deserves to have their respective pain treated fairly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/magazine/goy-antisemitic-youth-slang.html

Last week I interviewed a teenager about his use of the word “goyslop.” That’s a term for cruddy, low-quality food — as coined, or at least popularized, by far-right antisemites. This teenager was absolutely not a far-right antisemite; he just happened to attend a New Jersey high school where students, Jewish and Christian and otherwise, said “goyslop” all the time. “If your friend goes and gets McDonald’s, and gets two burgers and a shake,” he explained, “like, ‘Oh, my god, that’s so goyslop, that’s goy.’”

If you enjoy Philip Roth, you might be interested to hear that this school sits not far from where Alexander Portnoy, of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” was chastised by his mother for eating hamburgers and other chazerai — junk — while his constipated father drank “not whiskey like a goy, but mineral oil and milk of magnesia.” That’s one typical use of “goy,” or the plural “goyim”: to refer to those who aren’t Jewish. The Hebrew “goy” just means a people; Bibles routinely translate it as “nation.” But it also came, in Hebrew and Yiddish, to describe the peoples that Jews lived among — say, the ones Portnoy calls “goyim with golden hair and silver tongues,” the ones whose company will never actually promote his father, only treat him to the occasional weekend away in a “fancy goyischehotel.”

All of this is really normal. The world is full of names for “not us”: haole, gaijin, Englischer, allochtoon. They can be totally neutral, or deeply unkind, or just about anywhere in between. Many Jews would tell you “goy” is like, say, “foreigner” — neutral, but certainly capable of becoming an insult if the speaker wants it to.

The abnormal part, in this case, begins with the distressing number of people who imagine that the world is controlled by secretive Jewish cabals, and that the very existence of “goy” is airtight proof of their supremacist plot. For years now, antisemitic extremists have engaged in a trollish embrace of the word — creating, among other things, a neo-Nazi group called the Goyim Defense League and a fringe crowdfunding platform called GoyFundMe.

Some of these people felt vindicated by the release of documents concerning Jeffrey Epstein. Never mind the exploitation of children: Here in his inbox were wealthy Jewish men, writing one another sardonic emails about the goyim! The way Epstein used “goy” was often pretty similar to how gentiles might joke about WASPs, and his sourer uses just feel like a famously loathsome guy being loathsome, but still: Soon we had the far-right pundit Candace Owens treating this as proof of a bigotry fundamental to the faith. “This is, for them, a religious philosophy, a racist perspective that we are goyim, meaning cattle, that are meant to be herded and ruled over,” she told podcast listeners. That “cattle” idea traces back through literal Nazi propaganda to antisemitic sources like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; if Owens really believes it to be true, she differs from other Catholics in her understanding of Scripture, which would have God promising Abraham that “I will make of you a great cow.”

“Goyslop” has its roots in people who think this way starting to agree with Portnoy’s mother about the chazerai. But they imagine sinister Jewish elites purposefully feeding the masses cheap, enfeebling swill — a notion they express, for the most part, not on podcasts but in flippant internet postings about the pliant “goycattle” being herded to their troughs. And it’s that version of “goy” that ended up leaching into high school.

My source — 15, Jewish, a colleague’s son, resident of a racially and religiously diverse suburb — estimates that at least 70 percent of the students in his school would be familiar with “goyslop.” (Another student, who feels less firm on the exact meaning, puts the number at just under half.) He is fully aware that it arose via an “antisemitic thing about Jews trying to kind of poison the minds of the people through food and stuff.” But this is not, in his experience, remotely how it operates among his peers, who see it as criticizing, if anything, corporations. “It’s not really a thing like that anymore,” he says. “Like, everyone says it.”

This may be a wild journey for a word to take, but it’s not an unusual one. The internet is full of fringe jargon that breaks containment and seeps, mostly shorn of its original politics, into the way ordinary young people talk. How? One analogy might be the way that, in conversation, you can use a silly voice to playact as another type of speaker — say, pushing up your glasses and doing a “nerd” voice when correcting somebody. Online, people do this by parodying other posters’ vocabulary or typing habits — including, sometimes, the language the fringes are constantly bombarding everyone else with. It gets toyed with at an amused and dismissive arm’s length, then passes from arm’s length to arm’s length until it is miles from where it began, operating as a kind of 6-7ish in-joke that many young people will tell you is not nearly as deep or serious as whatever alarming origins you’re worried about.

How do y'all respond when you hear the "I'm gay and the Nazis came after us too and the Holocaust wasn't just about Jews and I don't know why people think that yadda yadda yadda" patter?

If it's someone who seems willing to listen I'll explain how the nazi homophobia circles back to antisemitism. If not, maybe some derogatory comments about them and their close family.

there's a lot of great points in the notes about how the Nazis' homophobia was rooted in antisemitism. Another thing for me is the fact that, had the Nazis been successful, there would be no Jewish life today. Queer people will always continue to be born, but for Jews, the only way to become a Jew requires other Jews - either being born to Jewish parents or being affirmed as a Jew by a rabbinical court of three other Jews. Had all presently living Jews been wiped out, all future generations of Jews would have been wiped out as well. The Nazis certainly would've liked to wipe out all queer existence, but that isn't possible. The complete eradication of all Jewish existence was at stake in a way it simply wasn't for queer people.

There isn't a single gay culture, not really. People talk about it, but they mean gay culture in their country, and usually gay, lesbian, and transgender people have different groupings within that. A Chinese gay man is going to have a different experience than a lesbian in the US. People in countries where people are arrested or potentially killed for being queer are not having the same experiences as people in countries where being gay is more acceptable. That's just how it is. And for most people, myself included, this is a culture you discover when you're older. You're not a child going to ballrooms and drag shows; you start doing that as a teen or an adult (if you choose to. No shame if you don't interact with the wider queer community at all). This is not your experience from infancy onwards.

I grew up Jewish. I grew up attending Seders and lighting yartzheit candles. Our house always had a mezuzah. This was my culture since birth, and it's my mom's culture, and my grandparents' culture. And when I talk to Jews in other countries, we have similar experiences. Yes, we have different minhagim, but we're celebrating the same holidays. I say the same prayers as a Jew living in Israel or Argentina or Russia. If you know Hebrew, you can speak to Jews all over the planet because they know it too. We have a unified culture, even if it's been tweaked a little here and there.

That culture was nearly destroyed. My great-grandparents' village is fucking gone. They escaped prior to the Holocaust, but there's nowhere to go back to. I can't find any info on it because their records and letters are in Yiddish, which their children never learned. (My grandfather and great uncles threw out a lot of stuff from the Old Country.) I don't speak a lick of Yiddish, so even with the letters, I couldn't find my way back to where my great-grandparents lived. There are stories of Jews returning to their homes to find everything Jewish destroyed. I remember one story of a Polish man returning to his town to find that the synagogue had been used to house cattle during the Shoah and was unusable (because of all the feces), and the grave markers in the cemetery had been removed and used to pave roads. (You can still find roads with fragments of Hebrew on them throughout Europe for this reason.) Everything was gone.

There's a difference between a community you enter as a teenager or adult and the community you're born into. Right now, my gaming community could implode and I'd be upset, but I wouldn't be devastated the way I'd feel if the US stopped existing. Hell, I was involved in leftist circles that ate themselves alive (iykyk) and that sucked, but I recovered. I don't think I could if my entire childhood was eradicated. If I couldn't go back home or find people who spoke my language, if the cemetery that housed my grandparents was desecrated, if all the important cultural buildings were filled with animal droppings.

You know how when you visit your hometown after you move away, and the ice cream place you really loved went under and it became a gas station? I think we all have an experience similar to that. It hurts, but imagine that on the scale of thousands. It's not just the ice cream place where you celebrated birthdays; it's your school, your library, your soccer fields, your favorite restaurants, your movie theaters, your malls, your parks, your clubs, your house, your neighbor's house, your best friend's house, all gone.

Look, gay culture in Germany was eradicated, too. We know this happened. But those men got to go back to their cities that were still standing. The same people were there. Of course, not all—I won't pretend that Germany didn't lose people in the war and buildings weren't destroyed. But people still spoke GERMAN. Yes, they were occupied, but their culture was intact. It wasn't suddenly impossible to get German food or hear German songs or read German books. That was true of every country hit by the war. Yes, it was tragic, but their culture remained. They got to remain German.

Jews suddenly had nothing. Our culture was gone. Our little pockets of Yiddish were gone. That culture was ripped from us and from the places we lived. We carried it to different countries, mostly the US and Israel, but it was an effort. There was a concentrated effort in trying to keep Jewish culture going. We built ulpans and yeshivahs to keep our culture going. We worked at ensuring our children knew our heritage and history.

Gay people just... didn't have to do that. Not because they didn't have kids, but because their larger culture was still intact and gay culture was usually transmitted through other ways, outside the families. (Cause let's be honest, if you were a homosexual who had kids in the 1940s, you were closeted and likely didn't tell your kids.)

Yeah, the numbers show how few homosexuals were in the camps, but that's not the important part. The important part is what Jews lost that homosexuals still had. That's why it's so important for queer people nowadays not to compare themselves to those murdered in the Holocaust. They don't have the same culture and their entire way of life wasn't destroyed.